Key Takeaways

The Power of Local Action: Meaningful change often begins at the municipal level through grassroots organizing, with the possibility to connect with likeminded individuals across the country and grow to a national scale.
Medicalization vs. Legalization: Recent executive orders favor a “capitalistic” model of progress, prioritizing patented, pharmaceutical versions of substances while often leaving natural plants and the communities most impacted by the War on Drugs behind.
The “People-to-Law Pipeline”: To ensure that new policies actually meet community needs, advocates must move from simply “asking for a seat at the table” to actively drafting their own legislation and building coalitions that force political incorporation.
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A community organizer by trade, Jason Ortiz is the Director of Strategic Initiatives for The Last Prisoner Project, focusing on policy and advocacy for incarcerated individuals affected by drug laws. He is currently focused on cannabis legalization at the federal level through the Cannabis Unity Coalition, the nation’s largest cannabis advocacy coalition.

He also serves as the Vice President of the Latino Cannabis Alliance and as the Chair of the Policy Committee of the Puerto Rican Psychedelic Collective.

A cannabis justice advocate since he was arrested for smoking on the way to school at age 16, Jason co-founded the Minority Cannabis Business Association and helped draft Connecticut’s 2021 cannabis equity framework.

He is the former Executive Director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, where he trained students to combat the war on drugs, and has served as the Policy Director for Connecticut for Accessible Psychedelic Medicine and as President of the Connecticut Puerto Rican Agenda, where he mobilized support for Puerto Rico’s independence.

Ever get frustrated by your Governor or local government, or feel like your voice isn’t heard? Or maybe you don’t feel represented by the politicians around you. Don’t you wish you could call up the president and tell him what he’s doing wrong? Well, Jason Ortiz is the person you want to know.

He forces politicians to do things they don’t want to do. Believe it or not, politicians get away with what we let them, and it may feel like we don’t have a voice, but we very much do.

Jason wears many hats, and while we won’t get to learn about them all today, we’ll instead get to focus on the actionable side of government: the intergenerationality of politics and advocacy, the political machine at work, how ideas become reality, and what that process looks like.

Learn from a true agent of change about what you can do to make the world a better place, because it’s true: the power is with the people. By discussing the ins and outs of drug policy and the recent executive orders on cannabis and psychedelics, we hope to help folks find their own path to how to get involved in their communities to change their governments and their laws.

More From Our Guest:

Last Prisoner Project:
lastprisonerproject.org

Latino Cannabis Alliance:
latinocannabisalliance.org

Jason Ortiz on Instagram:
instagram.com/jasonjortiz

This podcast is edited by Chad Eschman.

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