Hey, kids! Long-term and heavy use of marijuana isn't bad for the brain!

This is the kind of fact included in the text of Measure 80, a

in Oregon. The measure isn't just a pushback against federal drug laws. It's also a backdoor attempt to make public schools teach weed-friendly lessons to students.

This seems like a new form of Reefer Madness, trading overly negative rhetoric about drugs for a different type of propaganda.

Measure 80, also known as the

would legalize the growing and sale of marijuana for adults 21 and older. From a distance, the citizen initiative seems to reflect Oregon's healthy libertarian streak and its admirably permissive attitude toward private habits.

the measure is more ambitious. It appears eager to indoctrinate the next generation into thinking of marijuana use as no big deal and cannabis cultivation as downright patriotic.

(Hey, kids! Did you know that George Washington grew cannabis, or that Thomas Jefferson invented a cannabis-processing device? It says so in Measure 80.)

Backers say taxing commercial marijuana sales would generate $140 million a year. Under the measure, one percent of the net proceeds from those sales would help fund a drug education program in all Oregon school districts. The program would be required to meet three goals. First, it would teach students how drug abusers harm others. Second, it would convince students to be good citizens if they choose to use psychoactive drugs as adults. (Psychoactive is a broad term covering everything from caffeine to opioids, LSD and marijuana.)

Third, it would persuade students to decline to do drugs "by providing them with

accurate information

about the threat these drugs pose to their mental and physical development" (italics added).

Oregon teachers might wonder what constitutes "accurate information" about marijuana, the most politicized weed on the planet. Helpfully, the initiative sponsors anticipated the question. The measure is silent on the potential health risks of teen marijuana use, and it includes a 30-point preamble of beliefs and findings that Oregonians, by voting yes, declare to be true.

For example,

* Long-term, heavy marijuana users "do not deviate significantly from their social peers in terms of mental function."

* Moderate marijuana use "causes very little impairment of psychomotor functions."

* People who say marijuana is a gateway drug are lying. In fact, such lies "destroy the credibility of valid educational messages about moderate and responsible use (of marijuana) and valid warnings against other truly dangerous drugs."

* Marijuana is a "relatively nonaddictive and comparatively harmless euphoriant used and cultivated for more than 10,000 years without a single lethal overdose."

* Marijuana use "does not constitute a public health problem of any significant dimension."

* People have been misled about the true environmental and medical benefits of hemp and marijuana by "federal and corporate misinformation campaigns."

Got that? And don't forget the part about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, our cannabis-loving Founding Fathers.

Initiative petitioner Paul Stanford, who owns a chain of medical marijuana clinics, said the pro-drug preamble was written as part of a larger legal strategy to prevail in court against the federal government, which still defines marijuana as an illegal drug without medical or social value. He said the measure expressly prohibits teen marijuana use, which is true. The goal of the drug education program, he said during an

is simply to provide students with accurate and scientific information about drugs.

He then returned to his remarks about the evils of marijuana prohibition and the wonders of cannabis.

It's not clear who would develop the curriculum for Oregon's drug education program. Maybe the Department of Education or local school districts would do the work. Perhaps the Oregon Cannabis Commission, a grower-dominated group created by Measure 80, would provide oversight.

Either way, the initiative puts Oregon in the business of promoting and selling marijuana. It also requires "accurate" drug education in schools, after spending several pages reciting, chapter and verse, what Oregonians would hereby define as The Truth about marijuana.

That's not decriminalization -- or education, either.

It's religion.

-- Associate editor

The Oregonian