Business View Magazine | September 2019

21 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2019 Founded in January 1995, the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) is the largest organization in the U.S. focused solely on enacting humane marijuana laws. Armed with tenacity, strong beliefs, and the slogan “We Change Laws,” the group’s bold mission is to change federal law to allow states to determine their own marijuana policies without federal interference, to allow the medical use of cannabis in all 50 states and U.S. territories, and to regulate marijuana like alcohol. MPP has been responsible for changing most of the state marijuana laws that have been reformed since 2000, including more than a dozen medical cannabis laws, the legalization of marijuana by voter initiative in Colorado, Alaska, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Michigan, and legislative legalization efforts in Illinois and Vermont. Recently, Business View Magazine spoke with MPP Deputy Director, Matt Schweich, and Director of State Policies, Karen O’Keefe, about the organization’s ground-breaking achievements to date and their plans to continue guiding the legislative momentum in favor of the cannabis industry. The following is an edited transcript of that conversation. BVM: Can you give us an overview of MPP? Schweich: “At the Marijuana Policy Project, we work on decriminalization and legalization (which involves taxation and regulation) of cannabis and medical cannabis at the federal, state, and local levels. Most of our success has been at the state level – that falls into two buckets: ballot initiative campaigns, which MPP has played a leading role in since 2012 when Colorado passed legalization at the ballot box; the other bucket is our legislative work. Karen oversees our legislative efforts, I oversee our ballot initiatives. We also have a presence at the federal level, trying to move things forward in Congress. Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) We Change Laws