Cannabis legalization advocate Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) said Wednesday that while Americans have the right to be concerned about people driving under the influence of pot, it’s just not that big of a deal, man.
He downplayed a viewer’s fears about stoned motorists, during Washington Journal, a daily call-in program on C-SPAN.
“If you talk to the experts and you talk to police officers who are in traffic control, they are much less concerned about somebody who has smoked a joint and driving [sic],” Blumenauer said. “They’re not going to be involved with aggressive road rage. They’re much more likely to pull over to the side of the road or buy a bag of Doritos. I mean, they are very clear that these are not the people who are the dangerous drivers,” he commented.
Blumenauer did say, however, that “there is a real problem of mixing alcohol and marijuana”– one that often blindsides casual users.
“There are some people who are kind of clueless,” he remarked. “One thinks of Maureen Dowd, the columnist for The New York Times who showed up Colorado evidently having her Chablis and her edibles, and had quite a stark experience. Well, there’s some public education to be involved.”
Last June, Dowd wrote that after legally getting high in Denver, she “felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain” and “curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours.”
Blumenauer, however, could not personally offer that education to Dowd or anyone else—the longtime supporter of ending federal cannabis prohibition has said the he has never been under the influence of the substance.
Later in the program, a caller from Ohio told Blumenauer that a local news program in Cleveland did a segment on a “guy [who] was driving and he was smoking pot, and it actually made him more of an attentive driver.”
Blumenauer did not directly address the statement, but pointed out that the government’s approach to cannabis is so broadly hypocritical, that it brings our entire drug policy into disrepute.
“How do we expect our kids to take our drug enforcement officials seriously when they can’t be honest?” he asked.
