My latest piece on the Huffington Post provides a summary of what MPP has in store for 2013. In particular, it lays out our general plans to change marijuana laws in states around the country and at the federal level, and it describes how we plan to continue building public support for future reform efforts.

Unless people have been hiding under a rock this past couple months, they know that more than 55 percent of voters in Colorado and Washington legalized marijuana on November 6. As a result, many people have grand expectations of how we’re going to get closer to ending marijuana prohibition in the U.S. this year.

Here is what I think we can reasonably accomplish by the end of 2013…

Check out the column at the Huffington Post to get the details, or you can find out more here on our website.

This past year was undeniably the most productive 365-day period in the history of the marijuana policy reform movement. There were a number of significant accomplishments, but here is the Marijuana Policy Project’s list of the “Top 10 Marijuana Victories of 2012.” As with our previous annual lists, it includes neither important scientific developments nor important international developments. Rather, this list focuses on the biggest marijuana-related policy accomplishments in the U.S. in the last year.

To read the full list, please visit The Huffington Post.

After the marijuana-policy-reform movement’s huge victories in Colorado and Washington on November 6, many people are asking, “What states will be next to enact measures to tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol?” (We refer to these as “T&R” bills or initiatives.)

It is important to note that this pair of 55 percent victories would have been less resounding had they appeared on the ballot during a midterm election. Presidential elections traditionally attract far more voters, many of whom are younger and more supportive of T&R than older voters. And when there are more voters, there tends to be more support shown for ending marijuana prohibition.

With that in mind, here is what the Marijuana Policy Project will be pursuing from 2013 to 2016:

To read the full list, please visit The Huffington Post.

I attended a progressive event with MPP’s Morgan Fox in D.C. last Tuesday, where Congressmen John Conyers (D-MI) and Barney Frank (D-MA) both spoke.

Unsolicited — in front of the 60 or 70 activists and opinion leaders in attendance — Rep. Conyers made an off-handed criticism of the drug war, which was nice to hear.

And Rep. Frank spent most of his time at the microphone talking about the marriage-equality victories on November 6 in four states, saying a few times that the gay-rights community “must press our advantage.”

In other words, if the political momentum is on your side, you should use that momentum.

After their remarks, I chatted with Rep. Frank one-on-one.  (This would surely be the last time I speak to him before he retires from the U.S. House in January.)  After congratulating me on our wins in Colorado and Washington on November 6, he said to me, “We must press our advantage.”

In fact, that’s what we’re going to do with a new slate of ballot initiatives for November 2016, as well as congressional legislation to allow states to determine their own marijuana policies without federal interference.

I want to thank Congressmen Barney Frank and Ron Paul (R-TX) for their service in the U.S. House; both men are retiring on the same day, as it turns out.  They’ve made a wonderful contribution to the marijuana-policy-reform movement through their legislative leadership over the last three decades.

In the wake of our victory in Colorado — where 54.8 percent of the voters passed Amendment 64, a constitutional amendment to regulate marijuana like alcohol — good people are understandably clamoring to pass similar measures in their states.

Here is a listing of the ingredients of the recipe that led to the historic victory in Colorado on November 6.

1. Presidential Election: Given that no one had ever previously legalized marijuana in the history of the world, we assumed that the election in Colorado would be close — win or lose. So we intentionally chose to place our initiative on the ballot during a presidential election, which always attracts a larger proportion of young voters, who are more supportive. …

To read more, please visit The Huffington Post.

The Marijuana Policy Project has largely sat out the campaign to end marijuana prohibition in California this election cycle, but the recent escalation of infighting among allies who claim to support marijuana legalization has inspired me to speak out, and firmly.

The best way to explain is to tell a true story about something that happened just across the border, in Nevada, in 2006.

MPP was in the midst of campaigning for our ballot initiative to tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol in Nevada. (Only six statewide initiatives to end marijuana prohibition have ever been voted on — one in California in 1972, one in Oregon in 1986, two in Alaska in 2000 and 2004, and two in Nevada in 2002 and 2006. The highest voter-getters were the 2004 Alaska initiative and the 2006 Nevada initiative; each received 44% of the vote.)

Surprisingly, one of the leading libertarians in Nevada — someone who had real access to mainstream media outlets — told me he was going to oppose our initiative. The reason? As a libertarian, he didn’t like taxes, and he didn’t like regulations.

I explained to him that it’s one thing to be disappointed with the exact wording of the initiative, but it’s another thing to actually oppose the initiative. He didn’t budge.

I then pointed out that if he opposed the initiative, he would also have to endorse making alcohol illegal. “How interesting,” he said, wondering what I meant.

I expounded that — by campaigning and voting against the marijuana initiative — he would be choosing to keep marijuana illegal instead of taxing and regulating it. So, if prohibition is somehow preferable to taxes and regulations, he should prefer alcohol prohibition over alcohol being taxed and sold in bars and restaurants.

I never heard from him again, even to this day. But, to his credit, he ended up not campaigning against the initiative, I think because he’s well known to be intellectually honest and consistent.

The same dilemma now faces anti-prohibitionists in California, except, unfortunately, some anti-prohibitionists are choosing to advocate for prohibition, because Prop. 19 isn’t “perfect enough,” they imply.

One need not be a lawyer to find something not to like about Prop. 19, if one looks hard enough. The initiative gives local governments the option to prohibit or legalize the sale of marijuana; perhaps you prefer not to give local governments any option at all? The initiative allows all adults to possess up to one ounce of marijuana; perhaps you prefer a pound or more? The initiative allows all adults to grow 25 square feet of marijuana; perhaps you prefer not allowing grow-your-own at all?

These kinds of debates are legitimate and — to be sure — it’s literally impossible to reach a consensus on any of these points before or even after a statewide initiative is drafted and qualified for the ballot. So the issue isn’t whether a consensus can be reached.

Rather, the issue is whether anti-prohibitionists really want their souls to be burdened with voting to prohibit marijuana — which is what they’d be doing by voting against Prop. 19 on November 2.

Have you ever heard a marijuana user say the following? “I don’t want marijuana to become legal, because it would take the fun out of it. It would make it less glamorous.”

I respond to such pea-brained declarations of adolescent rebellion by saying, “Oh, because you want to have more fun, you therefore want the government to continue arresting more than 800,000 people every year for what you, yourself, are doing? And you want to spend my tax money — and yours — to accomplish this?”

How selfish.

Of course, to be fair, people who say they like the glamour of being an outlaw don’t really want more than 800,000 of their brethren to be arrested every year for marijuana. It’s just that the glamour-seekers are losing sight of what’s really important: They’re choosing a public policy that resonates with them (keeping marijuana allegedly “cool” because it’s illegal), while inadvertently overlooking the horrible byproduct of that choice (arresting the equivalent of every man, woman, and child in the state of Montana every year, forever).

So, to bring it back to California, it’s important that opponents of Prop. 19 at least be intellectually honest: By opposing the initiative for whatever reasons one has, the tradeoff is that more than 60,000 people will continue to be cited for marijuana offenses every year in California. That’s not something that I’d want to have on my conscience.

Going back to the top of this column: Many people who remember the 1972 initiative in California, which lost with 34% of the vote, muse nostalgically about how great it would have been if that initiative had passed … how it would have changed the whole course of events, especially in the midst of President Nixon’s administration. But have you read that initiative? It was inferior to this year’s initiative in California.

And you know what? Coincidentally, they’re both labeled “Prop. 19.” The first Prop. 19 failed 38 years ago; do we really want to lose again, in just a few weeks?

Please visit Yeson19.com to support the current campaign.

You probably guessed wrong.

Peter Shumlin (D), the president pro tempore of the Vermont Senate, is one of only two major-party gubernatorial candidates in the nation to advocate publicly for the decriminalization of marijuana. (The other candidate is Dan Malloy, the Democratic nominee for governor in Connecticut.)

On August 10, just two weeks before Vermont’s primary election, Shumlin said on television, “We simply are penny wise and pound foolish to be using law enforcement dollars to be locking up criminals when they’re dealing with small amounts of marijuana.” He was consistent all the way through the campaign.

By making marijuana decriminalization — the removal of all criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana — a major campaign issue, Shumlin was able to overcome the odds by prevailing in a five-way Democratic primary.

His opponent in the Nov. 2 general election, Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie (R), is ultra-hostile to decriminalization efforts.

Supporters of sensible marijuana policies must do everything we can to help Shumlin get elected on November 2. If we succeed, Vermont has a good chance of decriminalizing the possession of marijuana, as well as allowing a handful of medical marijuana dispensaries to provide patients with improved access to their medicine in 2011.

When I met Shumlin in a Springfield cafe in 2002, he impressed me with his candor, especially since he was telling me the opposite of what I wanted to hear.

Howard Dean (D) was governor and about to run for president, and Shumlin was helping him steer clear of controversy by bottling up our medical marijuana bill in the state Senate. I suggested to Shumlin that he was single-handedly preventing medical marijuana from becoming legal. “Don’t kid yourself,” he responded. “Governor Dean would veto the bill anyway, so I’m just saving everyone the trouble.” He went on to say that he’d help pass medical marijuana during the 2003-2004 cycle.

He kept his word. With his help and the leadership of state Rep. David Zuckerman (Progressive), our medical marijuana bill was enacted into law in May 2004.

The story of our 2004 victory points to how we plan on being successful again in Vermont, if we can get Shumlin elected.

Vermont’s original medical marijuana bill, which sought to allow patients and their caregivers to grow their own marijuana for a variety of medical conditions, passed the Democrat-controlled Senate in 2003. But the bill temporarily stalled in the Republican-controlled House health committee, where we were shy of a majority vote.

One legislator on that committee, Rep. Bill Keogh (D), publicly said he’d support our bill if a majority of his constituents voted for the local medical marijuana initiative that would soon be on the citywide ballot in Burlington, the state’s largest city. The initiative then received 83% of the vote, Keogh changed his vote, and we therefore reached majority support on the committee.

But we had a governor problem. Jim Douglas (R), who replaced Howard Dean in January 2003, had publicly stated he was opposed to the bill. So we ran a heavy rotation of three TV ads in Vermont — separately featuring an AIDS patient, a cancer patient, and an MS patient — to pressure the governor and the legislature.

In the meantime, we were gathering postcards to the governor from concerned citizens all across Vermont. A reporter who was writing a story about our lobbying juggernaut was flipping through the postcards and noticed a name of particular importance — Kenneth Angell, the Catholic bishop of Vermont.

After the bishop released a public statement in support of our bill, the governor and the House health committee chair cut a deal: They’d let the bill pass out of committee, provided it would protect medical marijuana use for only three medical conditions; coincidentally, they chose AIDS, cancer, and MS.

The bill passed out of committee and also on the House floor, and Gov. Douglas let the bill become law without his signature.

Because there were no abuses of the new law, we were able to expand it in 2006 by increasing the number of medical conditions and the number of ounces/plants that patients could have. This expansion became law without controversy.

Flash forward to this year: On March 2, the voters of Montpelier, the state capital, passed a local marijuana-decriminalization initiative with an overwhelming 72% of the vote. And a bill to expand the state’s existing medical marijuana law to allow for the sale of medical marijuana through nonprofit dispensaries, which was cosponsored by Shumlin, passed three different Senate committees in March.

Vermont is poised to pass both a decriminalization bill and a dispensary bill next year, if Shumlin gets elected this November 2. In Vermont, successful gubernatorial races cost only $2,000,000 or so for the winning candidate; the Marijuana Policy Project has already raised/donated $14,000, and we continue to ramp up. Please help us make it happen.

(Note: This article also appeared on the Huffington Post.)

I’ve just returned to my home in Washington, D.C. from a trip to the “other Washington” — specifically, Seattle. My two visits to Seattle in the past month have convinced me that Washington state will probably be one of the first two states to tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol.

In mid-August, I attended Seattle’s Hempfest for the sixth time in seven years. For those who don’t know, Hempfest isn’t your run-of-the-mill marijuana rally. In fact, if it were, I wouldn’t attend. This year’s Hempfest, which was the 19th in 20 years, was the largest yet, with an estimated 300,000 people visiting Myrtle Edwards Park on the waterfront over two days. Each year, Seattle Hempfest is literally the largest marijuana-related event in the world.

And bigger is better; there’s safety in numbers. For two days each August, using, possessing, and transferring marijuana for no remuneration (passing a joint) is legal in the park. For a few years, this policy was an informal understanding between the Seattle police and the 100,000+ people they were serving and protecting. But, in recent years, the higher-ups in the police department have actually directed their rank-and-file not to arrest people at Hempfest for marijuana (unless someone is selling it or pushing it on children).

What events preceded this normalization of marijuana?

In 1998, 59% of Washington state voters passed a medical marijuana initiative; then, in 2007, the Washington legislature instructed the state Department of Health to define a 60-day supply of medical marijuana. In 2008, the Department of Health defined a 60-day supply as up to 24 ounces of usable marijuana and 15 plants at any stage of growth.

On a separate track, in 2003, 59% of Seattle voters passed a local initiative to make marijuana possession the lowest arrest priority for local police. After that, the number of arrests within city limits plummeted, and, in January of this year, the city attorney for Seattle announced that his office would no longer prosecute people for marijuana possession.

Seattle Hempfest both led to — and benefited from — the local 2003 initiative victory, for which my organization, the Marijuana Policy Project, provided substantial funding. For two days each year, Hempfest attendees see what it’s like for the public use of marijuana to be legal: There’s no violence (alcohol is prohibited during the event), and there’s good company and music and speeches. And the police see the same thing — especially the no-violence part.

The police and non-police leave with these observations and tell their friends and colleagues. Over the course of the last two decades, perhaps 1.5 million people — most of whom live in Washington — have witnessed this phenomenon. Quite simply, Hempfest has changed the local culture around marijuana. So it’s no wonder that the 2003 initiative passed, which then led to a more formal policy change with respect to marijuana arrests at Hempfest … and then the whole city year-round.

And now, support for making marijuana legal has broken the 50% threshold in the state. The three most recent statewide polls show that 56% of adults support “making marijuana possession legal” (January 2010), 54% of adults support “allow[ing] state-run liquor stores to sell and tax marijuana” (January 2010), and 52% of registered voters support “removing state civil and criminal penalties for possession or use of marijuana” (May 2010).

The 52% figure is probably the most accurate, because it’s important to survey registered voters — as opposed to all adults — when you’re thinking about supporting a statewide initiative, as MPP is considering doing in Washington state for the November 2012 ballot.

Because there are many supportive young people and independent voters who vote only in presidential elections, it’s vitally important to place difficult-to-pass marijuana initiatives on presidential-election ballots. Indeed, MPP’s initiatives have passed by surprisingly large margins in Massachusetts, Michigan, and Montana during presidential elections, while both of our initiatives in Nevada lost during midterm elections.

If we can agree on an initiative that’s drafted to appeal to swing voters (meaning it can’t be too radical) and it’s placed on the November 2012 ballot, I predict that marijuana will be made legal in Washington state in just 26 months.

And this would be a particularly sweet victory, since Gil Kerlikowske, the White House drug czar, is the former police chief of … Seattle.