Cannabis Legalization as a Pathway to Justice with New Approach PAC

Featuring Graham Boyd, Co-Founder and Executive Director of PSFC, and Founding Director of New Approach Advocacy Fund and Toi Hutchinson, President and CEO, Marijuana Policy Project

Graham: [00:00:35] So a marijuana arrest means you lose your ability to go to college. You can commit arson, murder, rape, any number of other crimes and keep your federal financial aid, but get arrested for marijuana. Then that's the end of higher education. What insanity is that? And especially if you are a young white person who's caught up with marijuana, the chances that you're actually going to get convicted are quite low. If you're a young black person, white high, and it was really in that moment of sort of career change that I asked myself the question of, well, in what ways might I care about this? And that frame of racial justice really came alive for me. [00:01:20][45.1]

Tulaine: [00:01:27] You're listening to System Catalysts. Each week you will hear personal stories of changemakers who are bringing more inclusive connective system level solutions to our most persistent challenges. I'm to Layne Montgomery. Even if you call yourself a system catalyst or aspire to be one, the political system can feel out of reach. We all know bureaucracy is slow, messy and complicated. On the flipside, if you manage to change policies, you can improve the lives of people by the thousands or even millions. For Graham Boyd, that meant supporting cannabis legalization efforts. When Graham worked as a lawyer. He discovered that marijuana had been a key driver of a mass criminalization in this country, and the data was clear. People of color were disproportionately arrested for possessing cannabis. Most of these people had no previous criminal record, yet this minor offense could cost them their college education, their housing, their jobs, even their children. Putting aside his views on cannabis. Graham realized this was a social justice issue. This is why, since 2010, he has been instrumental in passing ballot initiatives for the legalization of cannabis. Today, in states where it has been legalized, millions of people have avoided an encounter with a law that could have cost them their livelihood. In today's episode, we'll learn how having a political strategy and partnering with the right people can be the key to far reaching systems change. In this episode, a Jeff Walker spoke with our guests Graham Boyd and Tobi Hutchinson. [00:03:32][124.9]

Graham: [00:03:34] You've done a lot of impressive work to decriminalize cannabis and cannabis consumption in many, many states around the United States. And you've taken some unique strategies, but you've done it by pulling lots of different stakeholders together and lots of other people together. And I'd love to hear a little bit about that story. So maybe start there and lean forward. I'll start. Actually. Well, before I worked on cannabis reform. I went to law school in 1988, really, with the view of wanting to get a law degree to have an impact on trying to undo the legacy of slavery and racial oppression in this country. So really moving towards racial justice. And honestly, I drugs and drug policy wasn't even remotely on my radar. I was thinking about things like homelessness and immigration and environmental racism, a number of other things that to me, thinking about drugs was basically I'm not interested in that. [00:04:35][61.0]

Tulaine: [00:04:39] In 1997, Graham was asked by a good friend to litigate a case. It involved the famous businessman and philanthropist, George Soros. They wanted to pass a ballot initiative in California to make cannabis legal for medical purposes. [00:04:53][13.9]

Graham: [00:04:55] The federal government at the time, the Clinton administration announced that they planned to arrest any doctor who was so bold as to make a medical recommendation for use of cannabis, which today sounds kind of unimaginable. Right, That that that the doctor could not like say, yes, this could be medically useful. So I ended up bringing a lawsuit against the federal government on behalf of the doctors and patients of California class action who sought to exchange that information to have a medical recommendation. And it was successful. It went up through the federal courts and ultimately was denied review by the Supreme Court and really opened the door to the possibility, the legal possibility of medical marijuana states. So there I was, somebody not interested in drug policy that was responsible for one of the really the more important pieces of litigation of its day. And the ACLU was my co-counsel. [00:05:52][57.4]

Tulaine: [00:05:53] You likely know the ACLU. But in case you don't, it stands for American Civil Liberties Union. It is an organization that has been defending civil rights for over a century. [00:06:03][9.5]

Graham: [00:06:04] The head of the ACLU, the Time I Glasser, who was very interested in this issue as well, asked me if I would consider leaving behind all the other public interest work I was doing instead, working for the ACLU and starting a new project in their national office focused on ending the war on drugs. And it was really in that moment of sort of career change that I asked myself the question of, well, in what ways might I care about this? And that frame of racial justice really came alive for me and came to appreciate that the war on drugs was the occasion for the excuse, if you will, for arresting and incarcerating black people in our country, especially young black men in our country, who. [00:06:54][50.0]

Tulaine: [00:06:56] According to the ACLU, black people are 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for possessing cannabis, even though they consume it at the same rate. [00:07:05][9.0]

Graham: [00:07:06] At the time. It was really a revelation for me, and I realized that I had shared sort of the conceptual blinders of so many people in this country of, well, no, we arrest drug dealers because they're bad people who are causing violence. And that's just the way things are. And sort of shifted my thinking to realize now everyone uses drugs on sort of an equal basis. White people, white people, brown people, Latino. You know, you pick at the levels of drug use or similar. Most people get drugs from people who they know who are like them. So by kind of extrapolation, the diversity of drug dealers that the people who provide drugs is also white, black, brown, all races. And yet, who do we arrest? Who do we send to prison? Who do we incarcerate? It's not equal at all. And so that frame of racial justice became my reason for saying yes. Diverse invitation. [00:08:01][54.2]

Tulaine: [00:08:03] In 1998, Graham started a new project at the ACLU called the Drug Law Reform Project. [00:08:08][5.9]

Graham: [00:08:10] It grew over the next ten years to actually be the largest project at the national ACLU. The most employees litigated cases in the Supreme Court in cases all through the country about every aspect of the war on drugs. And it was exciting. That was back at the time when the federal courts were not so heavily skewed towards, you know, the sort of the very, very, very conservative appointees that now dominate the Supreme Court. This was a time when you could actually imagine kind of in the mold of Thurgood Marshall, of using litigation to advance and expand civil rights. And so we were successful in a lot of ways in doing that. But during that period, I would say in the early 2000, I really started to look at marijuana laws. And it's not so much about who fills up the prison because the sentences for most marijuana crimes or not and are not usually ten years at federal prison or 20 years in federal prison. Often it's a it can even be one night or two nights in a local jail. But that arrest, that arrest for marijuana ends up being a sort of an albatross around the neck of the person who suffers it for the rest of their lives in terms of employment, housing, education and the list goes on and on. Like even you know, one of the things that I found most startling was that under the Higher Education Act, a federal law that governs providing student financial aid, under that law, you're eligible for Pell Grants for, you know, all these sort of things that make it possible to go to college. And those will be taken away for only one reason, which is drug conviction. [00:09:52][102.1]

Tulaine: [00:09:54] In other words, a marijuana arrest means you lose your ability to go to college. [00:09:58][4.7]

Graham: [00:10:00] You can commit arson, murder, rape, any number of other crimes and keep your federal financial aid, but get arrested for marijuana. And then that's the end of higher education. What insanity is that? And especially if you are a young white person who's caught with marijuana, the chances that you're actually going to get convicted are quite low if you're a young black person quite high. Similarly, voting in the state of Florida, possession of a modest amount of marijuana counts as a felony. If you're convicted of a felony, you lose the right to vote forever. And so in Florida at the time, I believe the statistic was one third of black men in Florida had lost the right to vote forever. And so you think about even the fundamentals of education, democracy, access to housing, jobs, all these things could turn on the decision of a police officer to either say, oh, you shouldn't have that marijuana, let's just throw it down the sewer drain, which happens a lot. But it's much more likely if you're white or you shouldn't have that marijuana. We're going to put some handcuffs on you, arrest you, process you, maybe let you go the next day, but you have that arrest conviction. And so that fork in the road happened. So I just you know, I came to realize there's this underlying huge driver of racial inequality in our country that marijuana was driving and litigation did not seem to be a way of really tackling that. You could around the edges. So we brought a lawsuit about the federal financial aid, for instance, and we pushed for sort of, you know, it almost feels like putting out the little brush fires around the edge of the huge fire, the middle. Bridging leadership enables diverse stakeholders to address systematic challenges together. Global Organizations Synagogues has pioneered bridging leadership for over 35 years. Today, synagogues helps dismantle systems that create the most urgent problems of our time poverty, social injustice and climate change. To learn more about synagogues and how you can be part of their global network, visit synagogues dot org. [00:12:23][142.8]

Tulaine: [00:12:28] Just as Graham began reflecting on how litigation might not be the most effective way to solve this issue, he met Peter Lewis. Peter was the founder and CEO of Progressive Auto Insurance. He was also a millionaire. [00:12:39][11.5]

Graham: [00:12:41] You've seen the commercials with flu there on TV. Peter was the largest contributor to the ACLU, and I got to know him in that context to the ACLU. And he was an extraordinary man. I mean, I remember the first time I met him was at his apartment in Manhattan. And he you know, he was like, Graham, I'd like to get to know you. He sat down on the sofa and removed the lower portion of one of his legs and put the prosthesis on the coffee table. I'd been warned that this might happen, but Peter had a rare neurodegenerative condition in one of his legs that had been amputated. He had tremendous pain. He had been put on opiates. He had found it hard to function at sea. So he got off of opiates by using cannabis. And he was very open about this. And he had a yacht that went around the world called the Lone Ranger, and he sent it to New Zealand and flew to New Zealand to meet his yacht, the wife of the very wealthy. Right. And it just didn't occur to him that there was any reason not to bring his marijuana with him because he used that daily. And so we landed in New Zealand and was promptly arrested and sent to jail and spent a night in jail with a drug dealer. And Peter just had this moment of like, how could this be happening to me? This has to change. [00:14:02][81.1]

Tulaine: [00:14:04] And at that point, Graham met him. Peter had already funded three state ballot initiatives to try to legalize cannabis For those unfamiliar with the politics in the United States. Ballot initiatives allow citizens to place new legislation on a ballot or popular vote. The initiatives Peter had funded had all failed. [00:14:23][18.7]

Graham: [00:14:25] He asked me if I would consider coming to work for him and like, let's figure out how to kind of crack the code on this thing. Let's figure out how to start winning these ballot initiatives. And he said, I'll put my resources behind it, but we need to figure, I don't want to keep losing here. I want to figure out how to start winning. And so I went I went to work for him. I decided to make this my full time job, to work with Peter Lewis to see if we could make this change. The first thing that that he wanted to do was to hire a pollster to really understand public opinion. So why had he lost these three previous ballot initiatives? And at the time 2010, there was a ballot initiative that had been proposed by activists in California that was going forward that would have legalized cannabis. So what we did is we hired one of the best pollsters in the country and Greenberg and started digging in in a big way. We did polling nationwide all through the country. And then we watched the California ballot process really, really closely. We did experiments there. So in in small groups of voters, we tried delivering messages by mail and polled that group versus other groups to see how they voted on the actual California measure. And, of course, the people running the measure and knowing that Peter was interested were adamant that he should give them millions of dollars so that they could actually win. And Peter was steadfast. He said, I don't think you're going to win. I don't think you can win. I don't think you've done the groundwork to win. So I'm going to actually monitor and learn from this campaign, but I'm not going to make a huge investment in trying to win, which honestly didn't make him a real popular person with the folks who were in the movement at the time. But we learned a lot, Jeff. We learned a lot about who are the voters that actually decide this issue and developed what I would describe as hypotheses about how to reach those voters. And so one of the early learnings was a key part of the earlier campaigns. And the California campaign were trying to communicate with voters about cannabis itself. So to simplify it, it sort of say to your voter, you may think that arresting people for marijuana is a good idea because marijuana is dangerous. But let me tell you about marijuana. It's actually no more dangerous than alcohol. Arguably less so. And their science behind that into dear voter, you should really change what you think about marijuana. [00:16:51][146.1]

Tulaine: [00:16:53] Graham and Peter soon learned that approach doesn't work. Changing people's minds about cannabis wasn't easy. [00:16:59][5.8]

Graham: [00:17:00] One of the focus groups is the person who says, you know, my Uncle Bob just sits on the sofa in the basement and watches TV all day and smokes marijuana. And there's nothing you can tell me that's going to make me believe that marijuana does it cause that. And of course, we would be like, Well, Uncle Bob was already headed towards the sofa and the marijuana is something that is maybe comforting him being there. It didn't cause him to be stuck on the sofa, but to convince somebody that if they had lived experiences that their dear Uncle Bob is always on the sofa and they're smoking pot, well, pot is bad. So we were like, Well, everyone, like you need to stop talking about marijuana as a substance being good or bad or what have you that might get you to. Yes, in a medical marijuana context, but it's not going to get you to. Yes. And legalization. [00:17:50][50.5]

Tulaine: [00:17:54] So they had to switch gears. In 2011, they spent over $1 million to do a mock campaign and understand voters behavior. They ran TV ads, mail and online advertising in Colorado Springs to promote the idea of legalization. [00:18:09][15.1]

Graham: [00:18:13] From our hypothesis thought there were two messages that were probably most promising. One of them is a person, a man, preferably, who says, I don't really like marijuana. So we're meeting people where they are. I don't really like marijuana, but what we're doing right now isn't working. Arresting people, locking them up isn't working. What if we did something different and we raise tax revenue? So anyway, there's kind of the mom message, and then there's the cop message, the cop who's standing in the police station and sort of says, like, basically, I spend a lot of my time running around chasing after pot dealers. Pot users who really aren't that dangerous, aren't doing that much harm. But my bosses tell me that's what I have to do. I'd rather spend my time going after sexual predators and real criminals. [00:19:00][46.8]

Tulaine: [00:19:01] They polled before, during and after running those ads. [00:19:05][3.4]

Graham: [00:19:06] And so we could really zero in and see what messages worked. And most importantly, how did they impact the swing voter? Right. So about a third of the voters hate marijuana. They're never going to vote yes. About a third of them actually more or less like it or at least think it's, you know, neutral and they're probably going to vote yes. But there's a middle third who don't like marijuana and yet are open to the idea that we should stop arresting people for it. So how do you reach them? How do you reach them? So we generated all of this data about who is in that middle third, what are their demographics, what are their kind of opinion structures and what messages seem to work. So we had at that point the end of 2011, we had a kind of instruction manual for understanding public opinion and meeting people where they are to get them to a yes vote that had never been designed before. [00:20:04][57.5]

Tulaine: [00:20:05] Graham took the learnings from Colorado Springs to a real ballot initiative that took place in 2012 in both Washington State and Colorado. [00:20:12][7.1]

Graham: [00:20:14] We knew that it was not going to be a good or successful plan to say, you know, being brought to you by your friendly billionaire who would like to convince you to vote yes. And so there were groups who had been working on this for a long time, who had been unsuccessful previously, but who now had the kind of playbook and resources of Peter Lewis. [00:20:37][22.7]

Tulaine: [00:20:38] They won both campaigns, making both states the first ones to make cannabis recreational use legal. [00:20:44][5.8]

Graham: [00:20:46] And since that time, since 2012, every single campaign that has followed that kind of approach and I've been involved in many of them and has had sufficient funding, has won. So we won 21 statewide ballot initiatives that kind of take this approach of meeting voters where they are, have sufficient resources to communicate with voters and do so in a disciplined way driven by data. And that's been used by other issues as well. So it's really it's been an amazing thing. [00:21:15][29.0]

Tulaine: [00:21:18] In 2013, Graham founded New Approach PAC to expand efforts to support progressive ballot initiatives nationwide along with cannabis. The organization focuses on criminal justice policy reform. Today, nearly half of U.S. states have legalized cannabis. Former Senator Troy Hutchinson led these efforts in Illinois. [00:21:37][19.0]

Toi: [00:21:39] And I remember being a brand new legislator and everyone in what we call management, the caucus leadership and on the Democratic side said that I should stay as far away from this conversation as possible. Don't touch it with a ten foot pole. Every single opponent in your first targeted race is going to be is going to say that you want every kid in the district to have pot. You don't want to have to fight that. Just stay away from it. And being the rebellious one that I was, I was like, I just think that people on the ground are a lot further along on this than you guys are. They didn't make any sense to me. I couldn't imagine any law enforcement, anybody going to someone who was terminally ill and treating them like a criminal off the street when they're dying. I just I could not see them. And I used to have like little individual conversations. People like, what do you do when you meet someone who's sick and who uses this because they're sick? And then I met a patient in the district and it was a brand new set. I hadn't been a senator for maybe 20 minutes. And this bill kept coming up and coming up and coming up. And they had someone in in the Senate who carried it, who was a downstate prosecutor, the state's attorney, before. His name was Senator Hain. And they used to call him hang them, hang. That's how conservative he was. And he was carrying the medical marijuana bill. And so I was like, if he can do it this, there's no way that I'm not going to talk about this. So lo and behold, I walk right down the middle of the aisle and I sign my name to the co-sponsor slip and became a co-sponsor of the medical pilot program and didn't hear one mumbling word about it. In my first race, nobody said anything. [00:23:18][99.0]

Tulaine: [00:23:20] In 2019, J.B. Pritzker became Illinois governor. [00:23:23][3.1]

Toi: [00:23:24] So by that point, we'd been through three governors that wouldn't do anything. The last Republican one bricked it so we couldn't grow it or change it or help it or anything, the medical program. And then we ended up getting as many is that we're in and we're gonna run on this. He ran on two things one, raising taxes and two, legalizing cannabis and wanted to do it for people, not the general fund. And we were like, Oh my God. It was three governors before we found one who believed us. Like, we looked at each other like, we might be able to do this. We really might be able to do this now. So then for sister legislators to amount them to on the Senate team that we got called the marijuana moms and the rest is history. [00:24:02][37.5]

Tulaine: [00:24:05] On January 1st, 2020, the recreational use of cannabis became legal in Illinois. Since then, the state has pardoned or expunged over 800,000 charges for minor cannabis offenses. That is more than all of the other states where cannabis is legal combined. [00:24:21][16.2]

Toi: [00:24:23] And then when it went live on January one, 2020, that was my governor convinced me to leave my very safe Senate seat and can be Illinois's first cannabis arm. So to stand up the program for the first time and the way he convinced me to do it was I need somebody who's going to do this, who believes in what it is we're trying to do. And if he goes and I know how you feel about this and I need I need you to help me do this. And I was blown away because he never said anything about again. He didn't say anything about the general revenue funding and talk about all the money he's in and we don't get the criminal justice reform right and we don't get black and brown folks in this industry, then we will have failed. And I need you to help not fail. So I resigned and started what was probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do, which was move from policymaking to implementation. And now I lead the Marijuana Policy Project, which is a national organization that's been doing this for 25 years or so, 27 years almost, which makes me really the only person in the country that's done all three of those specific things. So it's been a fascinating ride, I'll say that. [00:25:35][71.8]

Jeff: [00:25:36] So you got in because you thought it was the right thing to do. There's been a lot of talk about equity and the war on drugs. What part of that are you there? Because I want to make this equitable in the way people are treated or available. [00:25:54][18.0]

Toi: [00:25:54] A bit of it. We knew going into this we talked about it in a three pronged way. One, how do you change the industry? I think a lot of people would agree that we spent a lot of time in this movement writ large trying to free the planet and free the people, and not a lot of conversation about what kind of industry would pop up around this lean. Talk about that side of it. And so our first prong was how do you change the face of the industry? It could not be only rich, wealthy white people making millions and billions of dollars on the exact same activity that destroyed communities for decades. That is unconscionable and just cannot happen that way. And there was an intrinsic way of trying to explain this to people in a way that they hadn't thought about it before. And I and I kind of settled on you don't get racial justice without economic justice. So it's not enough to only tell black and brown people, we'll just stop arresting you. Well, there's a whole ecosystem and industry growing and there's millions of dollars being transacted that whole communities were locked up and locked out of. So not centering the folks who were harmed the most by the war on drugs. In a policy change to correct that thing. It was just that's a nonstarter. You just can't do it that way. [00:27:11][76.2]

Tulaine: [00:27:14] ToI was aware of the huge profit the cannabis industry could bring through legalization. Sadly, the booming cannabis industry tends to benefit those who are already privileged, with white men making around 70% of top executives at the largest cannabis companies. For this reason, too, we wanted to make sure cannabis tax revenue in Illinois was directed to the communities most affected by the war on drugs. [00:27:37][22.8]

Toi: [00:27:39] I became Illinois's first cannabis czar, and the global pandemic happened at the same time. And in that first year, we surpassed liquor tax revenue in the state. With cannabis in under a year. So to put that in perspective, we have tens of thousands of liquor licenses, including grocery stores, convenience stores. You can have alcohol and cane based pharmaceuticals delivered directly to your front door in those two arenas, and we surpassed liquor tax revenue with only 100 and so licenses across a 12 and a half million person states in one year. [00:28:16][37.5]

Tulaine: [00:28:18] Toy helped pass an instrumental law in Illinois, one that directs 25% of all cannabis tax revenue towards communities hurt by economic disinvestment, violence and the war on drugs. [00:28:30][11.4]

Toi: [00:28:31] That was probably one of the biggest wins we got. For those communities that are hardest hit for the war on drugs that take the most dollars. They are the same indices. They have low employment rates. They have high rates of violence. They have high rates of returning citizens from the criminal justice system. The number of issues that we end up having to fund through social service organizations at the state ends up having to pay for. When you break that down. For every dollar you invest in, that is a $6 rate of return. When you invest in a person, that's. [00:28:59][27.8]

Jeff: [00:28:59] A winning. [00:29:00][0.1]

Toi: [00:29:00] Art. So one out of every $4 that is spent and illegally regulated dispensary in the state of Illinois goes back to those communities, taking that bite out of the general revenue fund, which means we can find pensions, which means we can find other things like that because we've got a revenue source for some very serious and significant problems. And again, when it doesn't work, you keep working to make it work, you keep tweaking, you keep working and keep trying. You keep trying. That's that's the whole point. GOLDEN Is we done yet? [00:29:30][30.4]

Tulaine: [00:29:33] As president and CEO of the Marijuana Policy Project, TOI is expanding our efforts to other states where cannabis is still illegal for recreational use. Graham's organization, PAC, is a key donor and partner in cases where those efforts are pushed through a ballot initiative. [00:29:49][15.2]

Toi: [00:29:50] There's no way to do this work without really strong partners on the ground because we're also faced with a changing climate on the ground. It's harder and harder to raise money for it. So we rely on trying to convince the philanthropic organizations that criminal justice reform is best served by continuing to fight cannabis prohibition. And we fight really hard to get high net worth individuals who were doing individual donor and philanthropy work to not completely and totally pivot as though cannabis is done because it's not. And that means the partnerships that we have on the ground for where we need to fight are more critical now than they've ever been before. Cannabis is not the sexy thing anymore. Actually, psychedelics is. Cannabis is not anymore. Cannabis is an old thing. Mm hmm. But what's heartbreaking about that is that it's still a fight. There's still lives being ruined. And you can still lose everything you have. You can lose your job. You lose your children. You can lose your livelihood. You could not be able to get a student loan or sign a lease if you're anywhere where you touch federal dollars, If you live in any kind of public housing, it's not legal for you anywhere, even in a legal jurisdiction. So there's still matters of socioeconomic class and race, unfortunately, that tie very closely into how these policies are impacting people wherever they still exist. [00:31:16][86.8]

Tulaine: [00:31:20] Today, Nearly half of the states in the U.S. have legalized cannabis for recreational use. In these states, the number of arrests have gone down by nearly 70%. Unfortunately, Peter Lewis passed away in 2013 when only Colorado and Washington had passed these laws. [00:31:36][16.2]

Graham: [00:31:38] He didn't get to see the full fruits of his labor. [00:31:41][3.2]

Tulaine: [00:31:42] That's Graham again. [00:31:43][0.6]

Graham: [00:31:44] The motivating reason for me and Peter Lewis in doing the legalization work over these last ten years was really about ending the arrest of people whose lives are just turned upside down. You know, so many I would say most of the people who get arrested for marijuana possession, it's the first thing they've been arrested for. So these are people who are not on kind of the wrong side of the law until that moment. And it can turn your whole life around and often lead to more involvement in the criminal justice system. So ending the arrests absolutely has worked in a huge way in the states where those changes have been made. [00:32:21][37.2]

Tulaine: [00:32:25] And now our Rapid Fire segment. [00:32:27][1.9]

Graham: [00:32:32] What's one word to describe your journey as a system catalyst? Joyful. What's been one of the most gratifying moments along this journey? Peter Lewis passed away in 2013 of a heart attack unexpected and sudden. Then everyone was gathering together in Cleveland, where Peter was from in this family was from. And. The morning after I arrived there, I received a call from one of his children, and his children were gathered together and had opened an envelope that Peter left with them to be opened upon his death. They read it, basically said, Kids, I meant what I said, that I was going to hope that you are a philanthropist in my tradition, but I'm going to let you make that decision for yourself. So I left everything to you. And I don't want you to to feel any obligation to continue many of the philanthropy that I was doing. With one exception, I'd really appreciate it if you would try to continue a little bit more the work that I've been doing on marijuana reform. And and they did. But the sort of the beauty of that only of Peter speaking to us all from the other side, as it were, was just really indelible. Nice. What about your organization keeps you up at night. I really do have this sadness that we are in this stuck place right now, and I'm convinced it's just a matter of money. And so I feel sad that there are this first generation of philanthropists who really did it just out of pure belief in justice. Like the original donor said, I actually didn't invest in the industry and didn't make money from it. They did it in order to expand freedom. And there are a number of people who've become quite wealthy from cannabis reform really because of these efforts. And I really wish that those folks would step forward in the tradition of Peter Louis and Henry then in Virginia and finish the job on cannabis. If that spirit of generosity were somehow another ignited, and I feel very sad that it's not. For listeners who are wanting to be people like you, system catalysts, how do you think they have to start? I think being a systems analyst successfully requires not being in constant action. Not always. You know, juggling all the balls is running full speed ahead, but really having a period of pause and reflection. One thing that would be amazing is if there were an academy for System Catalyst retreats, you know how they're like, right? Retreats like Yaddo, like if there were a systems catalyst, take some time off, really reflect, bring in experts, talk about it, study it, develop plans. And in the meantime, you don't have to do anything else. I think that would really be helpful. [00:35:34][181.4]

Tulaine: [00:35:42] If you want to learn more about the Marijuana Policy Project, head on over to npr.org. You can also visit our website system Catalyst dot com, where you will find resources related to this week's episode. That's it for today's show. Please don't forget to subscribe to System Catalysts so you don't miss out on our new episodes. Also, do us a huge favor by reading our podcast and leaving us a review. Thank you so much for joining us and we'll catch you all in the next episode. Before we go, we'd like to thank our producers at Human Group Media. We'd also like to thank our incredible network of partners who are supporting our mission, echoing Green Dark Foundation, Population Services International, Virgin Unite. Charlize Theron, Africa Outreach Project. Boldly Go Philanthropy, Synagogues, The Philanthropy Workshop, Nexus and New Profit. If you are interested in becoming a system catalyst and would like to learn more about our partners, please visit SystemCatalyst.com. [00:35:42][0.0]