Madeline Martinez

By Anna Song, KATU News and KATU.com Staff

If you just listen to just one side of the debate to legalize marijuana, you'd think it was a wonder plant.

A common argument is that marijuana is safer than the legal drug alcohol. But do facts back up that assertion?

“Marijuana is safer than alcohol,” Madeleine Martinez of Oregon’s pro-legalization organization NORML said, “no one's ever died of a lethal dose of marijuana.”

Mark Herer, owner of the The Third Eye Shoppe, a classic “head shop” located on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard in Portland, said he’s “met a lot of screwed up people in my day, I've met a lot of potheads in my day… most of the potheads I know are not screwed up people.”

Washington state lawmaker Mary Lou Dickerson, 63, is pushing for legalization and equates current marijuana laws to alcohol prohibition in the 1920’s.

“We're treating marijuana like we treated alcohol during prohibition, and it doesn't make sense,” she said.

By Anna Song KATU News and KATU.com Staff

PORTLAND, Ore. - While state budgets in Oregon and Washington face gaping holes, advocates of legalizing marijuana say taxing pot can help fill those holes.

Madeline Martinez, Oregon’s executive director for NORML, the national organization that’s pushing to reform marijuana laws, says she sees a golden opportunity to convince people that legalizing marijuana could be a good thing after all.

“Why don’t we capture the revenue that’s just being lost to the criminal market in many regards and bring it to the people. We’re the ones who deserve it,” she says.

Her group estimates the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act, if passed by voters, would generate $140 million a year in revenue, 90 percent of which would go to the state’s general fund. The rest would go primarily to drug abuse treatment programs, Martinez says.

She calls it “Cannicare” because “we would be using cannabis money to pay for health care,” she says.

THE FUTURE IS OURS FOR THE MAKING

NORML’s Cannabis Café

By George Rohrbacher, NORML board of directors, medical marijuana patient

The first time I met Madeline Martinez, the executive director of Oregon NORML, she told me about her dream…a meeting place for medical marijuana patients, some space to hold classes, a very different vision of healthcare. I took a drive to Portland last week to see this dream come true; to Oregon NORML’s World Famous-Cannabis Café, a trip to a Future of our own making.

Set in an older blue-collar neighborhood in North East Portland, NORML’s Cannabis Café, occupies a building that was reputed to be a ‘speakeasy’ during Prohibition, alcohol Prohibition, that is. It includes a meeting/concert space upstairs for about 200+ people, in addition to the Café downstairs. Oregon NORML signed a lease this fall with the onsite restaurant operator and took over the business in November. NORML volunteers have been working there non-stop ever since, turning the building into the Cannabis Café. Its opening last month became a world-wide press event…apparently a lot more people than Madeline thought the NORML’s Cannabis Café was an idea whose time had come.

By Tracy Loew, USA TODAY

PORTLAND, Ore. — At first glance, the Cannabis Cafe, in a former adult club called Rumpspankers, looks like any other coffee shop. Customers sip coffee while playing cards, working on computers, or sharing a meal.

But here, patrons also slip away to smoke joints and pipes in the back. And the cafe features a vapor bar, where customers can get the benefits of cannabis without the harmful carcinogens.

The Cannabis Cafe is the nation's first medical marijuana smoking lounge. It's all perfectly legal and, for cancer patient Albert Santistevan, it's about time.

"It's a very positive atmosphere. We could use more places like that," the 56-year-old former jewelry shop owner said.

A few weeks ago, Santistevan would have had no place to go. But with the Obama administration's decision last month to soften the federal stance on medical marijuana, the Cannabis Cafe and a lounge across town popped up early this month.

The first marijuana coffee shop in the US has opened, posing an early test of the Obama administration's move to relax the policing of medical use of the drug.

By Nick Allen, Telegraph

The Cannabis Cafe in Portland, Oregon, is the first to give people who have been prescribed marijuana by a doctor a place to get hold of the drug and smoke it.

The Cannabis Cafe in Portland, Oregon, is the first to give people who have been prescribed marijuana by a doctor a place to get hold of the drug and smoke it, although they have to remain out of public view.

Patients who have been prescribed marijuana usually have to buy it from a licensed dispensary and then take it elsewhere.

Eric Solomon, the owner of the cafe, said he is looking forward to holding marijuana-themed weddings, film festivals and dances.

"I still run a coffee shop and events venue, just like I did before we converted it to the Cannabis Cafe, but now it will be cannabis-themed," he said.