How Did We Get Here
“Growing Forward” is a podcast dedicated to covering the cannabis industry in New Mexico. Right now that only includes the medical program, but lawmakers are inching closer to legalizing recreational cannabis as well. Before we dive into all the intricacies and nuances of legalization, we wanted to take a step back and give you the history of how we got to this place and time. Hosts Andy Lyman of the NM Political Report and Megan Kamerick, Correspondent at NMPBS and on-air host at KUNM discuss the start of the medical program in New Mexico, and what happened with recent attempts to pass legalization legislation in the Roundhouse. Be sure to subscribe to “Growing Forward” today and listen in next week (September 29) as we officially premiere episode 1 of season 1.
Music for this preview episode provided by:Podington Bear: “Good Times”Christian Bjoerklund: “Hallon”Blue Dot Sessions: “Highride”Kevin Macleod: “Backed Vibes”Growing Forward Logo Created By:Katherine Conley
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“Growing Forward” is a collaboration between New Mexico Political Report and New Mexico PBS, and is funded through a grant from The New Mexico Local News Fund.
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FULL SHOW TRANSCRIPT
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Jacob Candelaria: As a person of color, I have a problem with justifying cannabis recreational legalization now because it makes good financial sense, but sort of ignoring the trauma that’s been inflicted on communities of color for the last 50-60 years.
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Dede Feldman: This is a cultural change. I think it’s similar, although not as important, as gay marriage.
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Ryan Stoa: Here’s an industry that is one of the fastest growing in the world and in the country and, if thoughtfully regulated, can really provide some pretty enormous economic benefits, particularly for rural areas.
Darren White: And we’ve talked so much about diversifying our economy. Well, here’s an opportunity for us. I’ve seen a lot of different projections, a lot of different models, but you could easily be talking one hundred, two hundred million dollars in additional revenue for the state. More, possibly…
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Megan Kamerick: Welcome to growing forward, a podcast exploring the cannabis industry in New Mexico. I’m Megan Kamerick, correspondent for New Mexico PBS, a host at KUNM, and a former business reporter.
Andy Lyman: And I’m Andy Lyman, reporter for New Mexico Political Report. I’ve spent years covering the medical cannabis program here in New Mexico, decriminalization efforts, and past attempts to legalize the drug for recreational purposes. We are starting this podcast because we know the debate over legalization will definitely be front and center in next year’s legislative session.
Megan Kamerick: that is true, especially when you consider the possibility of a new revenue source for the state, which is now in economic crisis thanks to the covid-19 outbreak. This week, we want to lay out our plans for this season and preview some of the topics we’ll cover and the people we’ll introduce you to. Andy, discussions about medical use of cannabis has been going on since the 1970s at least. And yet, nearly 50 years later, there seems to be a lot of confusion about the drug, it’s medical benefits, and what happens if it is legalized for recreational use?
Andy Lyman: There’s a lot of moving pieces to try to keep straight on this. You’re right. There’s the current medical program and there’s questions over what that program should be doing now, what it should be doing in the future, the interplay between the medical program and the potential recreational program going forward. I think legislation is going to have to address some of these issues, or rulemaking. There’s a lot of questions over who is going to be in charge of this recreational program, whether the department of health will remain in charge of the medical program? There’s lot of stuff to talk about.
Megan Kamerick: Yeah, I was a business reporter for fourteen years. Eight of those in New Mexico. I covered a lot of different industries. I have to say, I never reported on one that was in such a strange, gray area, between being illegal, being a medicine and potentially a whole new way to bring revenue to a state that currently relies on just a few key sectors to fund its budget.
Dede Feldman: revenue-wise, in 2020, during the session, the legislature felt that the state was flush and had plenty of revenue. But next time, going into the session, I think there’s going to be a real feeling that, you know, we need those 11,000 jobs that this industry could create.
Andy Lyman: I’m a reporter with New Mexico political report and I’ve been covering this issue since about 2015. Some of the things I’ve seen change over the years is just the governor’s viewpoint on this. In 2015 the governor was Susana Martinez. In 2010, when she ran for governor, she said she was going to do away with program. And, she sort of walked that back a little bit, but it was a very hands-off approach from her department of health. It became sort of the wild west, as we’ve heard from some of our guests.
Megan Kamerick: because there was really no oversight, or there wasn’t aggressive oversight. It was just kind of a hands off… “we don’t really want to go forward. We don’t really want to roll it back. Let’s just ignore it.” (laughs)
Andy Lyman: Right. There were a lot of question about how do we regulate things, and even now, what you and I have learned is that there is still a sort of hands-off approach from the department of health when it comes to things like security, testing. They are regulating testing and labeling, but when it comes to how those businesses run as a business, the department of health sort of says, “that’s not our job to do anything about that.” And there become some complications there, where it’s just department of health overseeing this. And tax and revenue, the environment department, these departments don’t really have any say in how this business goes, what sort of products people are able to buy, how they’re using it. So, it is sort of confusing and so, hopefully, we can work through that a little bit.
Megan Kamerick: That’s what I realized when you and I started talking. There’s just so much to this industry. There’s so many elements and the fact that an industry that has that many, sort of subsectors, isn’t being regulated the way another industry would be (laughs) by these agencies. What is going on here? So, there’s so much to cover this season. We plan to start by catching everyone up on how we got to this place in time where we appear to be on the cusp of legalizing recreational use of cannabis. But andy, it really all started decades ago with the fight for medical cannabis, right?
Andy Lyman: Yeah, that’s right. Everyone remembers Gary Johnson, former governor Gary Johnson. He got a lot of flack in his second term for wanting to legalize this completely. But, it goes before him. In the late 70s, Lynn Pierson was one of the people we’ll talk about in a subsequent episode. He was a veteran, Vietnam vet, who was really lobbying to make this a legitimate medicine for his cancer diagnosis. So, we see waves of this from 1978 to about now, where it, sort of, pops up into our purview. But, like you said, it goes back a few decades where Lynn Pierson was pushing for this cannabis to be a legitimate medicine for his cancer and then we saw some movement around the Gary Johnson administration. Then, under Bill Richardson, there was a real, real big push to legalize this as a medicine. And, we’ll hear from Erin Armstrong, who was, Lynn and Erin… they’re both namesakes of the Lynn and Erin compassionate use act.
Erin Armstrong: I first discovered the conversation that was happening in the efforts that were underway through a friend who was interning, actually, at the drug policy alliance and was sharing with me some of the stories that they were starting to hear from patients who were desperate to be able to use this medicine. And, it just really struck a chord with me, you know? I was in the early years of my own fight. I was, very much, still learning how to manage symptoms and manage, sort of, the preparation and aftermath of radiation treatment. It really struck a chord with me. These stories really resonated in a really deep way. I was really moved to get involved, and beyond that, what I saw was patients who were incredibly frail, incredibly sick, some of them elderly, having to risk a lot to tell their stories, when they were needing to be actively using marijuana for medical purposes, but without the cover of the law.
Megan Kamerick: So, we’ll be talking to some of the major players who have already staked out a big chunk of this industry. But, we’ll also meet some up and coming entrepreneurs who are finding their own niches in building cannabis-based businesses. And there are so many of them. There’s so many permutations to how people are involved in this business, which I thought was just fascinating. We’ll hear from current and former lawmakers who talk about the policy implications of how we legalize. It’s not dissimilar to many other industries: how will it be regulated? Who will benefit? Who will be the innovators? But it is different (laughs) because there’s this whole history of communities who bore the burden of this plant being illegal. And so, when it comes to being no longer illegal, there’s a whole question of who gets to benefit?
Andy Lyman: Yeah, so the idea is, we’re going to have these discussions now, leading up to the next legislative session in January and February. They’re going to take this issue up. The governor has said she is really pushing for legalization. Of course, a lot of that has sort of been buried in current events, but it’s almost definitely going to be an issue in this next legislative session. So, we’re going to have some better ideas of the nuances leading into the session, hopefully. There’s issues of race. There’s issues of representation. There’s issues of who is really running the show in these organizations. And, what we’ll hear later is, there is at least one person who was staunchly against legalization who is clearly in the business now.
Megan Kamerick: Yes. That was one of the more interesting interviews (laughs). There are some people we talked to… there was a big push in the last session, which you covered. And, some of the folks that we talked to felt that that last attempt was way too complicated. We had this huge bill, it was something like 200 pages, I think? It laid out a lot of policy initiatives and how they’d be implemented. Those included efforts to address some of those inequalities that I mentioned, that fell on low-income communities, people of color, during the war on drugs. It also included a detailed regulatory structure, which, as we just mentioned isn’t really in existence right now. But, some of the cannabis business owners, who are quite successful, who are pushing for legalization, argued that the bill was just too complex. And, they felt like that doomed it and that kind of detail should be left up to the rulemaking process. But, there are others who say, “no, these details are really important. They need to be codified in the bill, to make sure there is equity in the industry.”
Representative Javier Martinez: So, the notion that these are new concepts, the notion the bill was too long, the notion that the bill was too complicated was simply, in my opinion, an excuse. The bill had been vetted, thoroughly, through the legislative process and it had been vetted thoroughly through the governor’s task force, which, as you may remember, started its work sometime last spring, 2019, and worked through the summer into the fall with a wide and very diverse group of stakeholders at the table, including folks from the medical cannabis industry, patients’ rights advocates, law enforcement, public health professionals, and so many others.
Megan Kamerick: So, these are kind of the competing forces that we heard while we were talking to people.
Andy Lyman: Yeah. There’s an element of legislation in general, in this. That’s sort of a conversation that I see happening a lot, is, is this bill too long? Just in general, about anything. Is this bill too long? Are we covering too many specifics? Anybody that follows legislation from point a, literally to the end, point Z, I guess you would say, is, how narrow do you go into something? Because the narrower you get in on an issue, you’re bound to overlook something. You’re bound to not address the one thing and we’ve seen over the years, countless legislation questioned by courts. “what did they mean by this? What did they mean by that?” So, there’s a school of thought that if you make a general framework and then you can, like you mentioned, allow the regulatory department, whatever that department is, to come up with rules and specify this is… and we do have a little of that in department of health right now. But, then there’s debate of, “well, they’re going against the law by doing this rulemaking procedure.” There was a lot of debate over how long the bill was, or bills. There were two bills. And, I think one of the arguments for making a longer bill is that they have to address the medical law, right now, in whatever draft they come up with, which adds pages. Then there’s the question of, “do we trust whatever regulatory department is going to address these issues?” Race, equality, all of these things that we’re going to get in to. And so, we’ve already done a lot of work getting all this information for the listeners. We’re really excited to share it with you all. But Megan, before we wrap up, is there anything that you wanted to share the question, some of the questions you had going in to this?
Megan Kamerick: When you were talking about the bill process. So, again, you’ve got this kind of unique industry where it’s about health issues, it’s about agriculture issues, it’s about regulation and licensing, it’s about criminal issues in the past. If it’s no longer going to be illegal, what does that mean for people who had a criminal past that was based on using or selling this plant. So, I think I was a little shocked, as you and I started talking, at how nascent the business is here, how new, in the sense that right now, as you said, the department of health is pretty much the agency in charge of overseeing the industry. That’s because we have a medical program. But, it’s also an agriculture industry. It’s a retail industry. It’s a controlled substance. So, this does risk invoking a cliché. You brought it up before… it really is kind of the wild west right now. And, I guess I didn’t pay attention when I was a business reporter, or over these last few years, just those details. And, you’ve covered a lot of that (laughs). People we interviewed would be talking, you would tell me stuff. I’d be, like, “Wait. Go back. I don’t understand.” (laughs) and so, I… I guess I just thought it would be a little more developed in terms of a regulatory framework than it is, in terms of water usage and controlling that. So, I see a lot of potential pitfalls right now, if we don’t get this right, if we do legalize. But, I also see a lot of potential for innovation and we found that’s already happening. And, I thought that was really interesting. Entrepreneurs are always innovative, interesting people to talk to, so those are kinds of the things that struck me as we worked on this over the last few months. What about you, Andy?
Andy Lyman: Everything you just said is exactly what I’ve been sort of having to deal with in the last five years. Obviously, my lens on this is the political nature of things and so I haven’t covered the business aspect of it as much. But there is a whole industry there. And there’s even a debate on whether you call this an industry or a program. Going back to your comment about DOH being the sole regulatory department on this, it causes some issues there, because the department of health doesn’t, contrary to, probably belief, they don’t run the health inspections of restaurants. That’s the environment department. And so, right now the environment department doesn’t have anything to do with going in and examining products on the shelf. And, of course, that’s part of why these bills get so long, because then you start figuring out which department is going to oversee this. There’s even, I think, a proposal in one of the bills to create a cannabis commission. There’s a lot of room to, like you said, be innovative. I remembered a conversation with somebody as I was covering a meeting over this, I forget who it was, but she said, “New Mexico doesn’t have to be like Illinois.” Illinois was one of the last states, more recently, to legalize recreational-use and, there was a task force put together by the governor in 2019, and they used the Illinois model as, sort of, a framework. And so, this person I was talking to said, “you know, we’re New Mexico.” That kind of brings into this conversation, that we are New Mexico. We don’t always have to do things the same way Illinois or California, a Colorado…
Jeff Holland: And, I will say this: you know, I love New Mexico. I’m New Mexico through and through. And we have been at the top of all the wrong lists for a long time and at the bottom of all the good lists for a long time. And, if we play our cards right, and do the right things, New Mexico has an opportunity here.
Andy Lyman: And, as we’ll get into in some of these episodes, we don’t have the same mechanism as Colorado or California did, to put this to the voters. And so, it’s really going to put a lot of onus on the lawmakers to make sure this is a good bill, that we’re going to get the people that are opposed to this. Another thing that I’ve been thinking about as we’re talking to these people is, this is a substance that a lot of people had experience with at some point in their youth and they just don’t anymore. There’s a normalization that goes along with it. There’s people who maybe used it, or knew people who used it in the 70s, 80s, and had some sort of personal bias against it. And, I think, as we go forward, to look at, this is a medical substance and I can’t think of any other substance out there that is simultaneously medical, where a doctor can say, “this helps you medically,” but you can also, theoretically go into the equivalent of a Walgreens to go buy it over the counter, right? (laughs). So… and we did talk to someone, we’ll get into one of these episodes later where, she said, “it’s kind of all medical,” right? If you’re buying it recreational. That we’re all using it in some sort of medical fashion, whether it’s for mental health, physical. I guess the same idea that you’re self-medicating if you use alcohol, or Tylenol, anything like that. So, it’s very… I can’t think of another issue like that, where it takes up two different categories at the same time.
Rachael Speegle: Cannabis can be useful for wellness, in a way that shifts from day to day and moment to moment, depending on what’s thrown at us in our life, because it might shift day-to-day. You know, I might need some help with sleep, and then there’s nothing wrong with needing something that gets you down on all fours to play with your kids, your grandkids (laughs) over the weekend, that helps with the stay-at-home cabin fever that we’re all experiencing and stimulates creativity. I don’t think that those categories should have to fall under recreation. I think it’s part of wellness. And, in our American culture, we tend to shame people for pleasure and for seeking pleasure. And, I think that pleasure should be more available in the human experience.
Andy Lyman: And, that goes into the fact that, children can use it medically, right? So, if you have a condition and you’re under 18, you can be recommended to use it, but yet, if you go into a recreational shop, you have to be 21, according to the bills they’re putting forward. So, there’s a whole lot of stuff that we could probably talk hours about (laughter).
Megan Kamerick: That’s what I realized as we were trying to put this together: there’s so much to talk about. And, even over ten episodes, we probably won’t be able to get to all of it. And, one question I had, Andy, was there not… are some lawmakers, am I wrong about this, they wanted to possibly do a constitutional amendment?
Andy Lyman: Yes, that is something that has been going on for a number of years, specifically under the Martinez administration. Remember, we talked about, or I had mentioned that, she really didn’t even want a medical program when she was campaigning for governor. And then, when she actually won, I would have to assume she realized that this was not going to be a very popular decision to do away with this program that actually helps a lot of people. But, she was very staunchly against even legalizing hemp. Now, that’s a whole other conversation. That was sort of an accidental thing that hemp became legal, because she didn’t veto the bill in time and the supreme court said, “well, it’s legal now.” So, looking at it through that lens, she really was, adamantly opposed to legalization of cannabis that has THC in it, and the, sort of, gameplan there was that lawmakers would put it as a constitutional amendment. A little background on our state constitution, our state constitution does not allow for initiatives like other states do, where we can… or a proposition. California, I think, has a proposition program where, you get enough signatures, it goes on the ballot. We don’t have that. The closest thing we have is a constitutional amendment, because we don’t want to just put constitutional amendments in willy-nilly, is that, you have to let the voters decide on that. Now, the problem is, it does become part of the constitution. So then, you have another way of, right now, actually, another constitutional amendment that people are going to decide on is whether the public regulation commission should be elected or appointed. And so, that is going to be in the constitution, however they vote on it. If they vote yes, it should be appointed, it will be part of the constitution and you get into a debate over, how much change should we put into this constitution? And, should our constitution say, “cannabis is legal”? Now that we have a governor sympathetic to this issue, I think the consensus is, we should not do a constitutional amendment, for a number of reasons. As we’ll get into in another episode as well, it actually might take longer. The legislature has to vote two-thirds to approve this Constitutional Amendment, and then it goes to voters. And then it has to go back to the legislature to, sort of, work out the framework of how that law works. I don’t think we’ll see a constitutional amendment in January, but the governor did say everything’s on the table, so… we’ll see.
Megan Kamerick: And that could be a much longer process and, of course, one of the factors we’re looking at here is, there’s some element of, at least trying to be among the states who are earlier in the process, legalizing cannabis. I mean, there are already a number that have, but you lose some of the economic benefit by waiting, because, after a while, “well, everyone has legalized it, so…” (laughs). There is the idea that you want to be on the cusp of the wave, not in the back so you get that economic benefit. But, what’s also interesting to me is, we’d come across, as we were trying to find people to talk about hemp and water and cannabis and water, this is still, on the federal level… so, that makes all these questions… I think that’s one reason, maybe, some lawmakers wanted a constitutional amendment: “well, we didn’t do it. The voters chose it.” (laughs) that, sort of, reality of what it is at a federal level puts a whole other layer of complexity over this, that you wouldn’t have in almost any other business.
Andy Lyman: Yeah, the interesting point you just brought up about it being federally illegal, I had had a conversation with somebody in the past year or so, who worked for a government contractor. And, I think, one thing we, as New Mexico, tend to overlook is we can legalize it all we want, it really doesn’t change it for people that maybe want to use it recreationally, especially if they get drug tested for a job for a government contractor. At that point, it may as well not be legal in New Mexico at all, because if you’re working for the feds, or a contractor for the feds, it doesn’t apply to you, right? It’s still federally illegal. There’s another issue in there, that I don’t know if we’ll have time to get into it in any of these episodes, but one thing I’d covered, I think last year, was the state did a big push for hiring new employees. They called it a rapid-hire event. And I had a patient contact me and say, “i really want to get a job working on a road construction crew, but because I have to use heavy equipment, and I get drug tested, I wouldn’t qualify for that job,” right? So, you do have… even on a state level… this contradictory issue of yes, we want to normalize it. One of the last laws that they passed to update the current medical law does say it should be treated like any other medicine, but even still, on the state level, to get a state job, it’s not treated like any other medicine, right? You could test positive for valium, but because that’s federally legal and it’s on a certain schedule, it’s fine, you know. So, I think there’s still some things we need to work through as a state to figure out how normalized do we want to make this and how… are we o.k. With state employees using cannabis, not at work, but possibly testing positive for it. There’s a whole scope of how long THC lasts in your body. My understanding is you can test positive for it weeks later, and you haven’t even touched it. You can use it on a Friday, go to work on Monday, possibly test positive for it, but you’re not impaired, whereas there are other substances that you could be impaired and wouldn’t be tested for it.
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Megan Kamerick: One thing we should add, that you might notice, is that we’re very specifically using the word cannabis rather than marijuana. Andy, why is that?
Andy Lyman: Well, some of the people we’ve spoken with, and I’ve heard this over the years, that marijuana, sort of, goes back to the early part of the century, where there was sort of this fear of marijuana coming across the border. Everyone’s probably heard of the term “reefer madness.” There was a lot of movies in the, I think, 1920s…
Megan Kamerick: Yes, one very specific movie in the 30s, yes, “reefer madness.”
Andy Lyman: Yes, there was actually a movie called “reefer madness,” and there were a couple of them in this propaganda category of movies. And, there’s this argument that the term marijuana, which is a Spanish word, was being used to sort of weaponize, as a scare tactic, as this evil substance that was coming over from Mexico. So, there’s a lot of people in this world that really look back to that time and say, “we should stop using that word.” So, yes, we have sort of chosen to use the word cannabis. It also… it’s a little bit more of a technical term, right? The same reason we’re not using the word pot, or weed, or any of those slang terms. I think that there is, sort of, a decent argument to use the technical term for this.
Megan Kamerick: It’s also, marijuana is a really, highly-politicized word, and, as you referred to that… I think William Randolph Hearst was behind a lot of those pushes (laughs) to demonize marijuana. So, people we’ve talked to who are advocates for legal cannabis or for medical cannabis are very adamant that they want to use that word and not marijuana, because they want to be pragmatic and clear about the scientific benefits of this plant and not get caught up in the past political battles over it.
Andy Lyman: Yeah, and I think, someone we talked to also pointed out to us that cannabis is actually a catch-all term for even hemp, right? It’s the scientific name of a plant and then you drill down to whether it has THC or not.
Megan Kamerick: (exacerbated laughter). There’s so much to talk about and so much complexity, so I’m really hoping that everyone will find this as fascinating as I did, jumping into it as someone who didn’t know anything about it, really.
Andy Lyman: Yeah, and, you know, I’m obviously bringing up some things that we probably are not going to get to. There’s so much to cover in this and I think, even in our ten episodes, we do cover a lot. And, there’s still so much more to cover. So, hopefully everyone can join us and listen in. New episodes are released every Tuesday, so be sure to subscribe today, wherever you get your podcasts.
Megan Kamerick: Growing Forward is a partnership between New Mexico PBS and New Mexico Political Report. Funding provided by a grant from the New Mexico Local News Fund.
Andy Lyman: Our producers are Kevin McDonald and Bryce Dix. Special thanks also to New Mexico Political Report Editor Matthew Reichbach. Music for this episode is by Christian Bjoerklund. And our Growing Forward logo was graciously created by the uber-talented Katherine Conley.
Megan: we want to hear from you. To share your story, suggest future episode topics, or just stay in touch… Send us an email at growing forward at n-m-p-b-s dot org. Next week, we dive headfirst into the history of medical cannabis in new mexico.
Andy Lyman: Until next week, thanks for listening and join us again next time, for growing forward!