Mark Kleiman has offered some intriguing observations (here and here) regarding what may happen if a state legalizes marijuana this November. He forecasts the responses of state government, federal government and legalization activists, all of which is fine as far as it goes, but he leaves out an important detail: Legalization would create a new player in pot politics, namely whoever sells legal pot.
As we have seen with the drugs we have already legalized (e.g., alcohol) a legal industry in psychoactive substances will make a great deal of money and use it to keep regulatory structures weak. In Oregon, the legalization initiative gives the private pot production industry a baseline of control (self-regulation only) that the alcohol and tobacco companies could only dream of. In the other states, any new industry will immediately go to work eliminating the weak regulatory controls proposed in the initatives.
How successful these new corporate entities will be in their lobbying isn’t knowable, but it is clear that one cannot predict post-legalization scenarios without taking into account the actions of this new player in the game.
Tags: marijuana legalization
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It’s putting the cart before the horse to assume that legalization will create an “industry” that will “make a great deal of money and use it to keep regulatory structures weak” isn’t it? First of all, the industry in place in California is lobbying for more regulations right now (i.e. the Ammiano bill). Second, a lot depends on the regulatory model. Those that call for smaller, decentralized operations or for the state to be a player in the trade might not create the Anheuser Busch of marijuana. It will also depend to a large extent on how willing various growers/companies are to form trade groups and work together; not a given in a competitive, emerging industry.
Yeah. Just like the grape growers in California and their experience with alcohol prohibition. At one time, those grape growers lived on the criminal edge. Now they have the largest cash crop in the state (behind marijuana). In some communities, they are even respected people. Read up on it a little, and how they engineered a state initiative in 1932 to repeal state alcohol prohibition laws.
But the reality is that the marijuana market is huge right now, easily into the billions, and perhaps as large as the market for beer. You have three basic choices for who will control the market, make all the rules, set all the production standards, and collect all those billions. The choices are:
1) Government
2) Private Business
3) Organized crime
We have chosen organized crime to run this trade and collect all the billions. If you oppose legalization then you should explain why you think that giving the whole business to organized crime will produce the best results.