Val Hoyle is bad at her job

The vulnerable Oregon Democratic Congresswoman won't let voters forget she loves helping her cannabis industry donors make more money

Congresswoman Val Hoyle (D-OR04) prepares paella, perhaps a preferred 4/20 pairing, outdoors in 2022. (Photo courtesy Jason E. Kaplan/Oregon Business).

Well, hello there. I’ve been working on a big, time-consuming piece with lots of research for this weekend or next week, but I couldn’t let this week go by without giving a 4/20 tweet by Congresswoman Val Hoyle (D-OR04) the negative attention for which it practically begs. That one tweet tells us a lot about why Val Hoyle may well lose the congressional seat she just won in 2022. It turns out, you see, Hoyle is shockingly bad at politics.

For the uninitiated, April 20 has become something like the official holiday of marijuana. I heard recently the word “marijuana” is culturally appropriative or otherwise frowned upon by the people who frown on words. I think those people prefer the term “cannabis.”

But I digress. The origin of the April 20 marijuana holiday is something of a mystery, with theories ranging from 420 being the police code for illegal pot possession to a group of Marin County, California high schoolers who called themselves the “Waldos” for some reason and who gathered to smoke pot at 4:20 pm daily.

Val Hoyle, who was elected for the first and perhaps only time to represent Oregon’s 4th Congressional District in 2022, decided to celebrate the 4/20 “holiday” at least in part by tweeting a little video with fellow Oregon Democrat Earl Blumenauer.

A screen shot of the end of Hoyle’s video.

Hoyle introduces the video by observing, bizarrely, “It’s 4/20, and we are fighting back against the failed war on drugs.” As pro-Palestinian protesters say as they stake out their tent site on Harvard Yard, let’s unpack that.

If Hoyle is famous for anything, it’s her personal, financial and political relationship with the founders of La Mota, the marijuana company that recently attempted a bloodless coup of state government by distributing literal paper bags full of cash to well-placed Democrats. One of the La Mota founders, Aaron Mitchell, gave then Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries Commissioner Val Hoyle $20,000 back in June 2021 for her presumed re-election campaign. When Hoyle decided to run for Congress, she returned the contribution. Funds raised for state races cannot be easily used for federal races, and the $20,000 far exceeds the federal maximum contribution.

Then, in 2022, Mitchell and his La Mota co-founder Rosa Cazares contributed the federal maximum $5,800 in seven separate contributions made on the same day, which is both weird and also the subject of a Federal Elections Commission complaint.

Simultaneously, Hoyle, still BOLI Commissioner, was working hard to convince the agency’s apprenticeship board to issue a $550,000 grant to a brand new nonprofit that Cazares had formed with another Hoyle campaign donor, seemingly for the purpose of receiving the grant. The stated purpose of the nonprofit, called ENDVR, was to establish an apprenticeship program for cannabis workers of color.

Hoyle succeeded in issuing the grant, which was subsequently found to be illegal under federal law because, well, cannabis is illegal under federal law. Hoyle’s successor as BOLI Commissioner tried to claw the grant back, but a bunch of it had already been paid to Cazares’s ENDVR cofounder Laura Vega, and was unrecoverable.

Media outlets, in particular Willamette Week, which broke most of the news on the La Mota-Hoyle dealings, sought Hoyle’s records related to the grant and La Mota. Some of those records were text messages on a personal cell phone Hoyle refused to hand over to BOLI. The whole mess made national news.

So, tweeting about marijuana or 4/20 at all was an odd decision for Hoyle. But the language she used was even weirder: “fighting back against the failed war on drugs.”

If there is a “war on drugs” in Oregon, it doesn’t include marijuana, which has been legal for recreational use under state law for recreational use for nearly a decade.

The war to which Hoyle refers is the prohibition on federally chartered banks doing business with cannabis companies. That’s the “war on drugs” she and Blumenauer take on in their video.

But Oregon is awash in cheap marijuana, in part due to oversupply caused by illegal pot cultivation and sales that occur alongside the legal stuff. The casualties of the war on drugs are not the marijuana consumers, then, but the marijuana businesses.

One of La Mota’s main thrusts in its, uh, investments in Oregon Democrats was to somehow get them to legalize marijuana at the federal level so that it, and other Oregon pot businesses, could legally sell their wares outside Oregon, thus reducing the oversupply problem and presumably raising the prices they can charge in the state.

Blumenauer, referred to by one national marijuana group as the “Godfather of Cannabis,” sponsors a host of bills to throttle back federal prohibition on cannabis cultivation, sale, and banking. In other words, Blumenauer and Hoyle want to deliver exactly what La Mota wanted from the beginning: legalize marijuana at the federal level.

Hoyle is reportedly under federal investigation for taking money from La Mota and rewarding it with official acts, including the half-million-dollar grant. It is an odd legal and political strategy to continue to advocate for the financial interests of La Mota and other marijuana businesses.

Additionally, the politics around drugs are changing, rapidly, in Oregon. The Democrat-dominated Oregon legislature just resoundingly jettisoned the state’s lethal experiment in hard drug decriminalization. The main argument by what remained of proponents of decriminalization, at the end, was a warning against returning to the “failed war on drugs.” The legislature recriminalized anyway, because Oregon voters demanded it.

The National Institutes of Health recently published a study claiming regular cannabis use sharply increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. It’s hard to say, but the momentum toward decriminalization that Oregon helped lead appears to be stalling, and perhaps reversing.

In this context, it’s hard to understand why Hoyle would publish a video that suggests “every day should be 4/20.” It’s all so very tone deaf. Oregon’s not about to recriminalize cannabis, but it’s also just had a very rough experience with the excesses of progressive drug policy and the corrupting influence those policies have had on state politics with Hoyle herself in the middle of it.

The most likely explanation is the simplest: Val Hoyle’s bad at her job.