by Patrick Appel
A new paper considers the future of marijuana regulation:
Perhaps a better analogy than prohibition is, oddly, file-sharing. For years, the recording industry pursued in court those it believed were illegally sharing copyrighted music and videos online. Armed with a federal statute that permitted damages of up to $150,000 per violation, the industry sought to collect not just from entities like Napster and Grokster that facilitated file-sharing, but also from those individual consumers it believed were doing the actual sharing.
The industry sued as many as 35,000 people between 2003 and 2008 including, according to the Wall Street Journal,"several single mothers, a dead person, and a 13-year-old girl.", The result of this campaign was terrible publicity, relatively modest recoveries, and a steady drop in album sales." In November of 2008, the industry had had enough, announcing it would stop suing individuals and would seek to enforce its copyrights by other means. Facing a yawning gap between the legal definition of copyright infringement and the way the activity was perceived by consumers (particularly young ones)," the industry was forced to acknowledge that it had lost the war on the ground.
As with file sharing, the disconnect between the law as written and the conduct on the ground may simply have gotten too great to be tenable going forward. Although the federal government continues to assert that marijuana is a drug with no acceptable medical uses, majorities in more and more states are coming to the contrary conclusion.
The Dish 