Mark Kleiman, fast becoming the biggest buzz-harsher on the planet, worries that our state-by-state approach to legalization will end badly unless the federal government steps in to regulate the pot market:
The systems being put into place in Washington and Colorado roughly resemble those imposed on alcohol after Prohibition ended in 1933. A set of competitive commercial enterprises produce the pot,
and a set of competitive commercial enterprises sell it, under modest regulations: a limited number of licenses, no direct sales to minors, no marketing obviously directed at minors, purity/potency testing and labeling, security rules. The post-Prohibition restrictions on alcohol worked reasonably well for a while,but have been substantially undermined over the years as the beer and liquor industries consolidated and used their economies of scale to lower production costs and their lobbying muscle to loosen regulations and keep taxes low (see Tim Heffernan, “Last Call”).
The same will likely happen with cannabis. As more and more states begin to legalize marijuana over the next few years, the cannabis industry will begin to get richer—and that means it will start to wield considerably more political power, not only over the states but over national policy, too. That’s how we could get locked into a bad system in which the primary downside of legalizing pot—increased drug abuse, especially by minors—will be greater than it needs to be, and the benefits, including tax revenues, smaller than they could be. It’s easy to imagine the cannabis equivalent of an Anheuser-Busch InBev peddling low-cost, high-octane cannabis in Super Bowl commercials. We can do better than that, but only if Congress takes action—and soon.
Kleiman makes some good points about the radical insecurity of the legal regimes in Colorado and Washington, but I have to say I find his worst case scenarios a stretch. This, for example, is Kleiman’s understanding of federalism:
Justice Louis Brandeis’s praise for states as the “laboratories of democracy” has been widely quoted … Dr. Frankenstein also had a laboratory.
Oy. Pete Guither offers a must-read and detailed rebuttal. On the federalism point, is Kleiman honestly saying that the federal government is to be trusted in this area? The entire reason the states have taken the lead is that the feds still can’t change its absurd classification of the drug. Then Kleiman has a bugaboo about marketing, as if nurturing and cultivating a customer base for marijuana is some kind of a crime, or inherently damaging. Guither responds:
Sure, if marketing causes an increase in the overall number of users, and you assume that the same percentage of those new users will become dependent as in the original class, then marketing could lead to dependency indirectly. But that assumption is flat-out contradicted by evidence and common sense, since prohibition laws, to the extent that they deter at all, are more likely to deter casual non-problematic use than problematic use.
I know that it’s popular to claim that marketing is used to cause dependency, but there’s really very little evidence to support that claim.
But Reihan agrees with Kleiman that federal oversight is needed:
It’s easy to see why Congress doesn’t want to touch cannabis legalization. Though support for legalization has increased, the issue remains contentious, and it raises difficult questions regarding U.S. treaty obligations. But the federal government needs to step in to see to it that the emerging cannabis markets don’t spiral out of control. One of the central purposes of our federal republic is to regulate interstate commerce, and it would be foolish to deny that legalization in some states will have spillover effects in others.
By “spiral out of control” he means that lots of people may buy the product. It’s so weird to read a conservative making a case for socialized non-profits. Jon Rauch compares legalization to Obamacare, noting that much depends on the implementation:
[E]arly indications are that Colorado and Washington are faring reasonably well. If they pass the implementation test, marijuana legalization could prove that obituaries for effective, adaptive government—some of them written by me—are premature. But if they yield chaos or crisis, they would discredit the policy they seek to promote.
As of now, I’m cautiously optimistic that the states’ experiments will be made to work, not perfectly but well enough. But liberaltarians and drug reformers need to get it through their heads that just passing legalization initiatives is not enough. They need to stick around once the vote is over and commit to the hard slog of making the policy succeed.
Agreed. But I see no reason why reforming, adjusting and monitoring the impact of legalization isn’t best done by the states that have had the cojones, unlike the frozen-in-aspic feds, to actually deal with the issue in a way that isn’t transparently self-defeating.
The Dish 