McGregor Scott says he wants a new conversation about marijuana in California, arguing that state policymakers haven't addressed the broader impacts of legalization.

The U.S. attorney for California's Eastern District recently returned from a marijuana "summit" in Portland, Oregon, hosted by his Oregon colleague Billy Williams and attended by fellow prosecutors, law enforcement officials, federal regulators and a deputy U.S. surgeon general.

The Sept. 5 gathering was billed as "a sharing of perspectives on the current state of marijuana." Scott says he was so bothered by some of the things he heard at the event—particularly about teen marijuana use and its potential harms—that he's eager for a public debate about the "collateral damage of marijuana that we're not talking about."

"What we've done in California for the last 20 years is tell our kids that marijuana is medicine," Scott said in a recent interview with The Recorder, "and with very, very, very limited exceptions, that's not true."

Scott's frustration is emblematic of the larger state-federal conflict over marijuana that endures more than two decades after California allowed the use of medical cannabis. While state voters embraced the adult-use marijuana sales in 2016, Scott's office is still charged with enforcing federal laws that label the plant a criminal drug.

McGregor Scott

As the number of state-legal dispensaries and cultivation sites have blossomed in California's 34-county Eastern District, federal prosecutors have pursued a Chinese crime organization accused of buying 100 homes in the region to grow massive amounts of illegal marijuana. While state leaders looked for ways this year to encourage more licensed retailers to open, Scott's office charged six men with conspiring to transport almost 500 pounds of marijuana to Missouri.

Scott's office has also focused on illegal grows on federal land that have contaminated watersheds and harmed wildlife with the use of U.S.-banned chemicals. A federal grand jury in Sacramento on Thursday returned two indictments charging seven men for growing more than 2,800 marijuana plants in the Shasta-Trinity and Six Rivers national forests.

After telling others at the summit what was happening at grows such as those, "people came up to me and said they couldn't believe what they were hearing," Scott said.

State officials and some city leaders have launched their own efforts to stamp out the black market, which continues to operate despite California's legalization. The state has also worked with local law enforcement to eradicate illegal grows suspected of polluting watersheds and stealing water.

Nicole Elliott, Gov. Gavin Newsom's senior adviser on cannabis, said state voters also demanded protections for kids when they approved recreational use in a 2016 ballot initiative. The measure, which emphasizes "adult-use," mandates child-proof packaging on marijuana products, limits advertising that could reach kids and sets aside tax revenue for substance abuse education and prevention programs. It also sets aside $2 million annually for research on marijuana as a pharmacological agent.

"Prior to regulation, those controls weren't in place," Elliott said.

McGregor says he's not changing his office's priority of pursuing the black market. But he also wants more debate on what he calls "the facts" surrounding marijuana, "not the propaganda."

"What [this event] has motivated me to do is engage a little more in the public dialog on this issue because a lot of the things we've been told in California over the last 20 years just aren't true," he said.