Pubdate: Wed, 22 May 2013
Source: Patriot-News, The (PA)
Copyright: 2013 New York Times
Contact: http://www.pennlive.com/mailforms/patriotletters/
Website: http://www.pennlive.com/patriotnews/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1630
Author: Bill Keller
Note: Bill Keller writes for The New York Times

WANT TO LEGALIZE POT? HERE'S HOW

The first time I talked to Mark Kleiman, a drug policy expert at 
UCLA, was in 2002, and he explained why legalization of marijuana was 
a bad idea. Sure, he said, the government should remove penalties for 
possession, use and cultivation of small amounts. He did not favor 
making outlaws of people for enjoying a drug that is less injurious 
than alcohol or tobacco.

View full size But he worried that a robust commercial marketplace 
would inevitably lead to much more consumption. You don't have to be 
a prohibitionist to recognize that pot, especially in adolescents and 
very heavy users, can seriously mess with your brain.

So I was interested to learn, 11 years later, that Kleiman is leading 
the team hired to advise Washington state as it designs something the 
modern world has never seen: a fully legal commercial market in 
cannabis. Washington is one of the first two states (Colorado is the 
other) to legalize the production, sale and consumption of marijuana 
as a recreational drug for consumers 21 and older. The marijuana 
debate has entered a new stage. Today the most interesting and 
important question is no longer whether marijuana will be legalized 
- -- eventually, bit by bit, it will be -- but how.

"At some point you have to say, a law that people don't obey is a bad 
law," Kleiman told me when I asked how his views had evolved. He has 
not come to believe marijuana is harmless, but he suspects that the 
best hope of minimizing its harm may be a well-regulated market.

Ah, but what does that look like? A few places, like the Netherlands, 
have had limited legalization; many jurisdictions have decriminalized 
personal use; and 18 states in this country have approved the drug 
for medical use. Twelve others, including New York, are considering it.

But Washington and Colorado have set out to invent a whole industry 
from scratch and, in theory, to avoid the shortcomings of other 
markets in legal vices -- tobacco, alcohol, gambling -- that lurched 
into being without much forethought, and have supplied, along with 
much pleasure, much misery.

The biggest shadow hanging over this project is the Justice 
Department. Federal law still makes felons of anyone who trades in 
cannabis. The biggest shadow hanging over this project is the Justice 
Department. Federal law still makes felons of anyone who trades in cannabis.

Despite the tolerant drift of the polls, despite evidence indicating 
that states with medical marijuana programs have not, as opponents 
feared, experienced an increase in use by teenagers, despite new 
moves toward legalization in Latin America, no one expects Congress 
to remove cannabis from the list of criminal substances any time soon 
("Not until the second Hillary Clinton administration," Kleiman says.).

But federal authorities have always left a lot of room for local 
discretion on marijuana enforcement. They could, for example, declare 
that they will prosecute only drug producers who grow more than a 
certain amount, and those who traffic across state lines. Attorney 
General Eric Holder, perhaps preoccupied with scandal management, has 
been slow to come up with enforcement guidelines that could give the 
states a comfort zone in which to experiment.

One practical challenge facing the legalization pioneers is how to 
keep the marijuana market from being swallowed by a few big 
profiteers -- the pot equivalent of Big Tobacco, or even the actual 
tobacco industry -- a powerful oligopoly with every incentive to turn 
us into a nation of stoners.

There is nothing inherently evil about the profit motive, but there 
is evidence that pot dealers, like purveyors of alcohol, get the bulk 
of their profit from those who use the product to excess.

"When you get a for-profit producer or distributor industry going, 
their incentives are to increase sales," said Jonathan Caulkins of 
Carnegie Mellon, another member of the Washington consulting team. 
"And the vast majority of sales go to people who are daily or 
near-daily consumers."

What Kleiman and his colleagues (speaking for themselves, not 
Washington state) imagine as the likely best model is something 
resembling the wine industry -- a fragmented market, many producers, 
none dominant.

This could be done by limiting the size of licensed purveyors. It 
would help, too, to let individuals grow a few plants at home -- 
something Colorado's new law permits but Washington's does not, 
because polling showed Washingtonians didn't want that.

If you read the proposal Kleiman's team submitted to Washington 
state, you may be a little boggled by the complexities of turning an 
illicit herb into a regulated, safe, consumer-friendly business.

Among the things on the to-do list: certifying labs to test for 
potency and contamination. (Pot can contain, among other nasty 
things, pesticides, molds and salmonella.) Devising rules on 
labeling, so users know what they're getting. Hiring inspectors, to 
make sure the sellers comply.

Establishing limits on advertising, because you don't want allowing 
to become promoting. And all these rules must account not just for 
smoking but for pot pastries, pot candies, pot-infused beverages, pot 
lozenges, pot ice cream, pot vapor inhalers.

One of the selling points of legalization is that states can take a 
cut of what estimates say will be a $35 billion to $45 billion 
industry and earmark some of these new tax revenues for good causes.

It's the same tactic used to win public approval of lotteries -- and 
with the same danger: that some worthy government function comes to 
depend on creating more addicts. And how do you divvy up the 
revenues? How much goes to offset health consequences? How much goes 
to enforcement? How do you calibrate taxes so the price of pot is 
high enough to discourage excessive use, but not so high that a cheap 
black market arises? All this regulating is almost enough to take the 
fun out of drugs.

And then there is the issue of drugged driving. Much about the 
chemistry of marijuana in human beings remains uncertain, in part 
because the government has not supported much research.

So no one has come up with a pot version of the breathalyzer to 
determine quickly whether a driver is impaired. In the absence of 
solid research, some legalization advocates insist stoned drivers are 
more cautious, and thus safer. (Hands up if you want Harold and Kumar 
driving your taxi. Or piloting your airplane.) On this and much else, 
Washington and Colorado will probably be making it up as they go, 
waiting for science to catch up.

And experience tells us they are sure to get some things wrong. New 
York decriminalized possession of small amounts of pot way back in 
1977, with the condition that there be no "public display." The 
lawmakers meant to assure that you partied at home, not in the parks 
or on the sidewalks.

They did not envision that this provision would create a pretext for 
throwing young black and Latino men in jail. When police in New York 
City stop and frisk, which they do a lot in rougher neighborhoods, 
they order their targets to turn out their pockets and -- whoa, 
public display, come with us, son! Gov. Andrew Cuomo is promoting an 
amendment to curb that abuse of power.

On the opposite coast, California demonstrates a different kind of 
unintended consequences. The state's medical marijuana law is such a 
free-for-all that in Los Angeles there are now said to be more pot 
dispensaries than Starbucks outlets. Even advocates of full 
legalization say things have gotten out of hand.

"It's a bit of a farce when you can watch people come out of a 
dispensary, go around the corner and resell their drugs," said Gavin 
Newsom, the lieutenant governor and former San Francisco mayor, who 
favors legalization. "If we can't get our medical marijuana house in 
order, how do we expect voters to deal with legalization?"

He is now part of a group discussing how to impose more order on 
California's medical marijuana market, with an eye to offering 
broader legalization in 2016. And, he told me, his state will be 
paying close attention to Washington and Colorado, hoping somebody 
can, as Mark Kleiman puts it, "design a system that gets us to 
'orderly' without getting us to 'way too stoned."'
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom