EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Rick Steves Slams ‘Racist’ Anti-Pot Laws

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Tuesday, October 07, 2014

Shelby Sebens, GoLocalPDX Reporter

Travel guru Rick Steves kicks off his legal marijuana tour in Oregon today, Tuesday, traveling to 10 cities in six days to push for an end to pot prohibition. Before that, he gave an exclusive interview to GoLocalPDX about his support of legal marijuana and why he's against "racist" anti-pot laws. 

GoLocalPDX: What do you hope to accomplish with your “Travel as a Political Act: Ending marijuana prohibition in Oregon" tour? 

Rick Steves:I think that a lot of people misunderstand what the whole drug policy reform movement is all about. I want to make it really clear it’s not pro-marijuana, it’s anti-prohibition. And in our country now we’ve got a prohibition against marijuana that’s causing more problems to our society than the drug that it’s trying to deal with.

I’m committed to the notion that use will not go up after Oregon regulates taxes and legalizes marijuana. It will just be regulated instead of black-marketed. There’s no society that has a track record that shows that when you ease up on the laws, that more people smoke pot. There’s no correlation. Anybody that wants to smoke pot now does, and they have to do it in a criminal kind of way.

We’re dealing with a 'lock em up' kind of approach, which I think is counterproductive. 

I bring a European perspective. In Europe they really think about pragmatic harm reduction. How do we minimize harm to our societies?

This whole marijuana prohibition is very costly. It’s diverting law enforcement resources from serious crime to running down petty marijuana cases. People who are getting arrested are not rich white guys They’re poor people and black people. It’s a racist law and this causes huge difficulties for people that are struggling to manage all the complexities that life throws them. 

Why do you support legal weed? 

I have supported it for the last 10 or 15 years. Mainly because I understand [marijuana prohibition] has very tragic and expensive consequences on our society. 

My friends in Europe tell me we have to make a choice: tolerate more alternative lifestyles or build more prisons. They remind me we lock up 10 times as many people per capita as they do. Either we’re inherently more criminal people or we’ve gotten something screwy about our laws. 

A lot of people want to speak out on this, but they’re nervous to because it might damage their reputations. If they're politicians, they’re worried about being labeled as soft on drugs. If they're business people, they don’t want to be put at a disadvantage at their place of employment.  

Nobody needs to vote for me. Nobody needs to fire me. I’m my own boss. I can just blame my European friends for my thoughts on this. I just feel like it's good citizenship for me to speak out on a law that is causing our society a lot of grief. 

What we have to communicate is this is not hempfest gone wild. The people who are pushing for taking the crime out of the equation and treating marijuana as a health and education challenge are people that care about their community. 

It’s just a very smart law that protects children, it makes no change on the DUI situation. Anybody who’s driving intoxicated should have the book thrown at them. 

Do you smoke marijuana? 

It doesn’t even matter if I smoke or not. I have and I do occasionally. The issue is what is a smart law and how do we minimize harm in society. 

What have you learned in your world travels about the legalization of marijuana? Who is doing it right? 

It’s interesting when you compare other countries’ policies on drugs. It’s important for us to know that the United States has written a law and sort of coerced all the other members of the United Nations into signing it that requires all signatories to wage trade sanctions against any country that decides to legalize marijuana.

So this forces countries to keep it criminal when they’d rather treat it as a health problem and an education challenge rather than a criminal problem.

But they can’t afford to be in a trade war with the United States.

When I leave Christiana, the hippy squatters community in Copenhagen where there’s a lot of people smoking pot, they say, "Be careful about your marijuana because here in Copenhagen, in Denmark, we have to arrest a couple of pot smokers in order to maintain favored trade status with America." 

This is embarrassing. The United States is taking the lead in keeping marijuana a crime. We insist on making marijuana a very expensive illegal crop rather than something that can be regulated and taxed and legalized. 

Have you received any backlash from your support of legal pot? 

I’ve been a board member of Norml (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) for over 10 years. I’ve been speaking out on this for nearly 20 years. I’m pretty straightforward. I’m not pro pot. I acknowledge that marijuana as a drug can be abused, it can be addictive. Every once in a while I hear somebody that says, "I know what you think about marijuana, I’m not going to buy your tour books."

I always think, "Well, Europe’s going to be a lot more fun without you."

This is an issue of what’s right for our society. I think the war on marijuana is a tragic thing. 

Steves will start his tour Tuesday evening in Portland and head to Eugene, Bend and other towns in Oregon, ending up in Gresham. He'll talk about travel and his experience with marijuana reform in Washington, which legalized the drug in 2012. Steves was a big contributor to that effort and is spending his own money to travel Oregon and promote Measure 91, which taxes, regulates and legalizes recreational marijuana for adults 21 and older. 

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