PORTLAND — Rick Steves smokes the occasional joint, but he’s not arguing for marijuana legalization in Oregon just because he likes to get high.
Steves, a nationally known guidebook author and host on public radio and television, said Tuesday he’s convinced that marijuana prohibition in the U.S. operates solely to harm the poor and people of color, and to profit off their punishment.
“It’s not guys like me, rich white guys, who need it,” Steves said Tuesday at a Portland hotel. “It’s the people who are arrested and cited, who are poor.”
Steves is crisscrossing Western and Central Oregon in support of a ballot measure to legalize marijuana, a movement that picked up steam in 2012 when Colorado and Washington state each approved legal marijuana and commercial outlets to sell it.
None of it would have happened without a plummeting stock market in 2008, Steves said.
“When you look at the end of Prohibition, it came during the Depression because they couldn’t afford to jail all those guys,” Steves said. “There’s no coincidence that (marijuana legalization) was taken seriously only after the recession.”
Steves wrote in the book “Travel as a Political Act” that his globe-trotting reveals marijuana decriminalization is good for society.
“There is this idea that there’s this reservoir of people who will immediately begin to smoke pot if it’s legal and ruin their lives,” Steves said. “In Europe, they’ve shown that that’s not true.”
The No on 91 campaign, which draws most of its funding from law enforcement groups, has said that marijuana legalization will make it easier for children to get access to the drug.
