LEGAL POT BACKER SEES PLUSES FOR STATE, BUSINESSES

Madeline Martinez will take a pass on the stoner humor, thank you
very much. For her, marijuana is a serious issue.

Martinez is executive director of Oregon's chapter of the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Last month, the group
unveiled a petition drive to place on the 2010 ballot the Oregon
Cannabis Tax Act, which would direct the state to legalize marijuana,
regulate its cultivation, sell it in liquor stores and tax the sales.
Farmers could also get permits to raise marijuana or hemp.

If voters approve the act -- at best, a long shot -- Martinez
estimates that it would increase revenue and decrease state spending
for such things as the prosecution for simple possession, ultimately
generating $300 million a year for the state.

"This is a law that would allow the state to end the black market of
marijuana sales, and it gets marijuana sales under the control of the
state and the money into state coffers where, I believe, it belongs," she said.

Martinez, a Los Angeles native, worked for seven years as a guard in
a California women's prison until degenerative disc disease forced
her into medical retirement. She disliked the prescription drugs that
killed her pain but left her woozy. When her family moved to Portland
in 1995, she joined the campaign to persuade voters to enact the
Oregon Medical Marijuana Program, which they did in 1998.

She has led marches in Portland calling for "normalizing" adults' use
of marijuana. She said she opposes any use of marijuana by minors.

Last week, Martinez sat down with The Oregonian. Her answers have
been edited for clarity and brevity.

If I were an employer, my biggest worry about the Oregon Medical
Marijuana Program is that my employees would be impaired. Is that
fear misplaced?

They should create an impairment test rather than spending so much
money going to the Legislature and trying to destroy a program that
works quite well. If we're going to talk about a safe workplace,
let's test for everything. Let's have an impairment test for
everyone. There was a great impairment test done here for the
Portland Police Bureau, and it turned out that people were most often
impaired because they were tired because of lack of sleep.

Have you found that cardholders can go back to work because of
medical marijuana?

That's a struggle right now with the employment situation as it is.
That's the problem we have, quite frankly. There are so many people
who want to be productive members of society and don't want to be
home on Social Security or be a burden. They want to be out there,
they want to be producing, they want to be adding to our economy.

Many ballot initiatives for things such as lotteries and sports
stadiums are sold to voters with promises of big tax revenues --
promises that often are overblown. How will the Cannabis Tax Act
achieve what you say it will?

In our numbers, we were actually very conservative. We wanted to
always weigh on the side of being sane with our numbers, not sounding
crazy. But we believe -- by the statistics that we've looked at, by
prohibitioncosts.org and by doing the math here in our state -- that
this is in fact a reality. This is all new. No one has done anything
like this. Oregonians are more progressive. I do believe that the
fact that our medical marijuana law will be 10 years old next year
already shows that people have become pretty used to it. They see
that it works.

What's the response from state officials?

They haven't responded very much. The only people who have are at the
Oregon Liquor Control Commission, and they are neutral on it. We just
got an endorsement from Barney Frank (a longtime Democratic
congressman from Massachusetts), and we're trying to get some of our
legislators to back us up. But we haven't gotten a lot of feedback
from them. We have more than 1,200 members (in Oregon NORML), and
we're going to be asking them to contact their representatives. But
no, it hasn't been overwhelming.

What advantage does medical marijuana bring to the economy of Oregon?

In 2005, it brought more than $900,000 to Oregon's budget, to the
Department of Human Services. The Legislature took out that money
from our existing surplus of the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program. We
have a self-funded program. Nobody pays for us to have this program.
We pay for it ourselves with fees. Plus, anybody who doesn't have to
be on the Oregon Health Plan, and we don't have to be paying for
their pharmaceuticals, obviously is a gain for all of us.

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FACTBOX

Madeline Martinez

Title: Executive director, Oregon chapter, of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws

Age: 57

Family: Married, two children, five grandchildren, three Pomeranians.

Recent honors: NORML's 2007 Pauline Sabin Award for women's leadership; first Latina elected to the group's national board.