An Oz Sighting: Senator Reynolds and the Bill That Got the Wrong Villain

Last session, Oregon State Senator Lisa Reynolds — a Portland Democrat and pediatrician — introduced SB 1548, a bill to limit THC in individual cannabis edibles to 10mg per piece.

She called it marijuana legislation.

That word choice is the first tell.

"Marijuana" is not a neutral term. It was introduced deliberately in the 1930s by Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, specifically to create a racial association — to link cannabis to Mexican immigrants and Black jazz musicians and manufacture public fear. Young Oregonians know this. Anyone who has spent real time in the regulated cannabis industry knows this. When an elected official uses that word in 2026 to frame a policy intervention, it tells you something about which conversation they think they're having.

It's not the conversation Oregon's cannabis industry needs to be having right now.

What the Bill Would Actually Do

Oregon's regulated cannabis market is struggling. The businesses that followed the rules — that built compliant operations, paid their taxes, invested in testing and packaging and responsible retail — are operating at the margins. Many have already closed. The ones still standing are doing so against considerable odds: a legacy market that doesn't face the same compliance costs, a tax structure that wasn't designed for this industry, and years of regulatory inertia that has been slow to support what it already legalized.

SB 1548 would add compliance costs to an already burdened industry. For smaller operators, this isn't a headache — it's a potential death sentence. Reformulating products, redesigning packaging, adjusting supply chains: these costs are manageable for large multistate operators. For the small Oregon businesses that represent the best argument for what a humane, locally-rooted regulated market can look like, they are not.

And what does the bill actually solve?

The argument is child safety. And to be clear — children consuming cannabis edibles is a real thing that happens and it's not great. The Oregon Poison Center does see pediatric cannabis cases. The concern isn't totally fabricated.

But let's look at what the numbers actually tell us.

Cannabis edibles have killed zero children in Oregon. Nationally, across all reported cases over five years, the number of pediatric fatalities from cannabis exposure is zero.

Fentanyl is a different story. The Oregon Poison Center reported 16 cases of illicit fentanyl exposure in children under six in 2023 alone — up from zero in 2020. Most of those children lost consciousness. Many stopped breathing. Naloxone was administered to 63% of them. Nationally, narcotic medication deaths in children increased 79% between 2021 and 2022.

Senator Reynolds is a pediatrician. She knows these numbers. Which makes the choice to direct legislative energy at cannabis edibles — while Oregon children are experiencing a fentanyl emergency — a Scarecrow moment of the first order.

This is not solving the problem that is actually killing children. This is solving the problem that makes for cleaner talking points.

The Medical Establishment Problem

I want to say something harder here, because I think it matters.

Senator Reynolds represents a medical establishment that has significant accountability questions of its own — questions that rarely get asked out loud by people inside the system.

The opioid crisis was not an accident. It was the direct result of prescribing practices encouraged by pharmaceutical companies and enabled by a medical profession that was slow to reckon with what it was doing. Millions of people were prescribed opioids by their doctors, developed substance use disorders, and were then labeled and discarded by the same system that created their condition. The human cost of that failure dwarfs anything in Oregon's cannabis poisoning data by orders of magnitude.

The medical system does not serve women well. It does not serve brown people well. It is unaffordable for a significant portion of Oregonians who need it. And cannabis medical patients are frequently afraid to disclose their consumption to their providers — because of exactly the kind of stigmatizing language that calling it "marijuana" in a policy context reinforces — which creates real clinical risk and represents a genuine public health failure.

Meanwhile: regulated legal cannabis markets are associated with decreases in opioid use and addiction numbers. For many people struggling with substance use, cannabis has proven to be an effective pathway toward stability as their physical, emotional, and social systems recalibrate. That's not ideology. That's what the data shows.

A pediatrician who wanted to protect children and improve public health in Oregon would be talking about all of this. She would be talking about fentanyl. She would be talking about safe consumption spaces. She would be talking about how to integrate cannabis into honest clinical conversations instead of driving it further underground. She would be talking about the harm reduction evidence.

Instead she introduced a bill using a word that signals a particular political constituency, framed it as child protection, and left the actual children — the ones being rushed to hospitals for fentanyl exposure — for someone else to worry about.

That's not missing information. That's missing judgment.

The Oz Test

🧠 Scarecrow: Reaching for a talking points solution to a marginal risk while a genuine crisis goes unaddressed. Mistaking the problem that's easy to name for the problem that's actually causing harm.

🦁 Cowardly Lion: Using "for the children" framing and a racially loaded word to signal safely to a constituency rather than doing the harder work of engaging honestly with what Oregon's cannabis industry needs, what harm reduction actually looks like, and what a pediatrician with real courage would say about fentanyl right now.

Senator Reynolds may be a good person. I'm not here to say otherwise. But this bill is a Yellow Brick Bureaucrat moment — and Oregon's struggling small cannabis businesses, and the patients who depend on a legitimate regulated market, and the children actually dying from fentanyl, deserved better from a physician-legislator who should know the difference.

Have you seen Scarecrow, Tin Man, or Cowardly Lion politics show up in your community, your workplace, or your experience navigating public systems? Submit an Oz Sighting at runninganyway.com. Anonymous submissions welcome. Critique the behavior, name the impact, no pile-ons.

Good governance requires a brain, a heart, and courage. We don't have a leadership shortage. We have a willingness shortage.