Dear Members of Congress,

As experts on drug policy, we appreciate your thoughtful leadership in creating a serious and bipartisan attempt to examine our nation’s federal cannabis laws. We are writing to express deep concern about the influence of the tobacco and alcohol industries on this process, including your own hearing on cannabis decriminalization.

It is critical that we get cannabis policy right on a national level. As your hearing notice rightfully describes, by making changes in federal cannabis policy, Congress could address racial disparities in the criminal justice system, improve treatment options for veterans, and potentially allow for equitable access to traditional banking services. It could also facilitate more effective public health policy, better protect our youth, and create a new national industry that allows for meaningful participation by small businesses and historically excluded communities.

We risk repeating past public health and regulatory capture mistakes if large conglomerates from the tobacco and alcohol industries are permitted to exert excessive influence over the design a national regulatory framework – and seek to shape policy in the interests of private profit, rather than public good. Tobacco and alcohol corporations should not be invited to testify on what marijuana laws should look like, whether directly or through their cannabis policy front group, The Coalition for Cannabis Policy, Education, and Regulation (CPEAR), of which Altria Client Services and Molson Coors Beverage Company are members.

Indeed, CPEAR is already pushing for legislation that would direct a national regulatory framework for cannabis to be modeled after alcohol regulations, without examining the risks and benefits of such a model, and with policy decisions to be made by trade organizations representing such industries. We urge you to reconsider giving these interests an ongoing platform and consider including the voices of small businesses and public health experts instead.

As Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser stated, “If a national market is not rolled-out carefully and in stages, large companies, particularly existing tobacco-focused companies, will be able to move into new markets immediately, displacing and pushing out smaller players.”

As the Truth Initiative stated, “The history of tobacco use provides an instructive example. . .  due in large part to the tobacco industry’s successful concealment of related health effects, which made it difficult to act aggressively to curtail youth use once those harms were known.”

As Alcohol Justice stated, “By allowing these industries' perspectives into the discussion around legalization frameworks, we are giving them the opening to mold cannabis regulation into a form that props up their own lethal products."

As the Drug Policy Alliance stated, “We have long been concerned about the entry of large commercial interests into the legal marijuana market. Big Alcohol and Tobacco have an abysmal track record of using predatory tactics to sell their products and build their brands – often targeting low-income communities of color and fighting public health regulations that would protect people… We urge caution to elected officials in taking these industry actors’ counsel and demand that the communities who have borne the brunt of prohibition be given the right-of-way when it comes to shaping policy and benefiting from the legal regulation of marijuana.”

As Parabola Center for Law and Policy stated, “Part of effective regulation is ensuring that we don’t repeat other industries’ mistakes. You only need to look at Juul’s recent multi-million dollar settlements across the country to understand that Big Tobacco isn’t to be trusted as an authority on public health. We have to preserve our progress, not hand over the national market to companies with a long and disturbing history of fighting the exact type of regulations that reduce youth access.”

And as Transform Drug Policy Foundation stated, “handing control of drug markets to exploitative profiteers is, from a public health perspective at least, potentially an even worse scenario than unregulated criminal control of drug markets.”

For these reasons, we respectfully ask you and your colleagues to reconsider your decision to invite representatives of the alcohol and tobacco industries into conversations about national marijuana legalization. The issues involving personal freedom, economic justice, social justice, public health, and criminal justice reform are complex enough without centering the voices of corporations who put their own profits above each one of those values.

Sincerely,

Shaleen Title, Founder and Director, Parabola Center for Law and Policy

Kassandra Frederique, Executive Director, Drug Policy Alliance

Dasheeda Dawson, Chair, Cannabis Regulators of Color Coalition

Cruz Avila, Executive Director, Alcohol Justice

Donna Vallone, Chief Research Officer, Truth Initiative

Jason Ortiz, Executive Director, Students for Sensible Drug Policy

Rafi Aliya Crockett, Board Member, Washington D.C. Alcoholic Beverage Control Board

Shanel Lindsay, Co-Founder, Equitable Opportunities Now

Cat Packer, Distinguished Cannabis Policy Practitioner in Residence, The Ohio State University Drug Enforcement and Policy Center

Dr. Bryon Adinoff, President, Doctors for Cannabis Regulation

Eric Foster, National Policy Director, Minorities for Medical Marijuana

Timothy McMahan King, Senior Fellow, Clergy for a New Drug Policy

Ronald Simpson-Bey, Executive Vice-President, JustLeadershipUSA

Laury Lucien, Subcommittee Chair, Massachusetts Cannabis Advisory Board

Dan Riffle, Former Director of Government Relations, Marijuana Policy Project

Jane Allen, Senior Manager, Public Health, RTI International

Stephen Rolles, Senior Policy Analyst, Transform Drug Policy Foundation (UK)

Òscar Parés, Deputy Director, ICEERS Foundation (Spain)

Kristin Jordan, Founder, Asian Cannabis Roundtable

Steve DeAngelo, Founder, Last Prisoner Project

Natacha Andrews, Founder, National Assocation of Black Cannabis Lawyers (NABCL)

Chelsea Higgs Wise, Executive Director, Marijuana Justice

Paulo José dos Reis Pereira, International Drug Policy Research Group, Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (Brazil)

Adam Smith, Founder and President, Alliance for Sensible Markets

Nicole M. Ricci, President, NY Small Farma Ltd.

Lezli Engelking, President and Founder, Foundation of Cannabis Unified Standards, Inc. (FOCUS)

Kelly Rippel, Kansas Cannabis Coalition

Helen Gomez Andrews, Appointee, Massachusetts Cannabis Advisory Board

Tauhid Chappell, Philadelphia CannaBusiness Association (PCBA)

Kim Napoli, Appointee, Massachusetts Cannabis Advisory Board

Kassia Graham, Cannabis for Black Lives

Monica Medina-McCurdy, All Together Now Pennsylvania

LaWann Stribling, Deputy Director, NORML Maryland

Dana Cisneros, Legal Advisor, NORML Orange County

Ramsey Doudar, Founding Member, Patients and Users for Reasonable Policy

Victoria Litman, Adjunct Professor of Cannabis Law, Roger Williams University School of Law

Caroline Phillips, Board Member, Supernova Women

Professional affiliations are listed for identification only.