Pubdate: Wed, 04 Dec 2013
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2013 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Patt Morrison

POT'S GO-TO GUY

COME NEW YEAR'S DAY, in Washington state and Colorado, marijuana will 
be legit, courtesy of two ballot initiatives. How do you create a 
legal business out of an illegal one? After 13 years of Prohibition, 
the country at least had an earlier legal liquor market to refer to. 
That's where Mark Kleiman comes in, the go-to expert on these 
matters. A UCLA professor of public policy and author and coauthor of 
books like "Marijuana Legalization," he's heard all the jokes about 
"hemperor" and "your serene high-ness." He was consulted by 
Washington state's liquor control board, which has to come up with 
the nuts and bolts for the new law and which asked him for, well, the 
straight dope.

What did Washington want to know?

They really wanted numbers from us: How big is the market? How do we 
allocate stores across the counties? What impurities should be tested 
for? What are the environmental impacts of cannabis production? If we 
limit the amount produced, what should we use as the basis? Ounces? 
Grams? Production space?

Didn't the initiative make provision for all that?

As far as I know, nobody who wrote that initiative consulted with 
anybody in public administration, or about the supply chain or any of 
the other stuff that goes into this. I once tried to make a list of 
the disciplines you would have to know to make good drug policy, and 
I stopped at 25. Medicine, psychology, pharmacology, law, 
international law, social psychology - there was no way people 
writing an initiative would have gone through the full analysis.

What advice did you offer?

We didn't really make recommendations; we were providing facts and 
options. [Personally], I wanted to allow home delivery instead of 
stores. Washington had had a long fight about home delivery of liquor 
- - they were worried they couldn't control it.

I was pushing for something fairly elaborate in the way of vendor 
training. This started out as a question of what to require on the 
label. Do you just want chemical analysis? Or do you want something 
that'll tell the consumer what this is likely to do to them?

You've got at least two chemicals that matter - THC and cannabidiol - 
and another 60 that might matter. At least you'd want those two 
numbers, or a potency rating. I was ready to find out [the data], and 
the papers weren't there. You can't do that research in the U.S. 
because you can't get the pot. I keep saying we don't know nearly as 
much about cannabis as Pillsbury knows about brownie mix.

You know the "slow" sign on the highway? To have a label that says 
"go slow" on any package with more than 6-to-1 THC to CBD, we 
couldn't find the science.

We haven't tried it on a thousand different consumers in different 
ratios to see what happened. There's no place that this stuff is 
[fully] legal. Even in the Netherlands, it's illegal to grow. As I 
kept saying, we're figuring out how to issue state licenses to commit 
federal felonies.

You say legalization will require more law enforcement at first, not less.

The initiative allocates money from the cannabis tax to education, 
healthcare and drug treatment. What did I just leave out? Law 
enforcement. None was allocated to law enforcement. That reflects the 
politics of the people who do marijuana legalization initiatives.

Law enforcement doesn't get money [specifically] to arrest burglars; 
they arrest burglars because it's part of their job. Still, I can 
understand their resentment. They're undergoing budget cuts and 
here's this initiative that puts more work on them, and the [tax] 
money goes to everybody else.

Washington is going to have privately owned stores. Why couldn't it 
run the operation itself ?

The law didn't provide for state-run stores. Here's another rub: 
Washington requires every official to take an oath to uphold the U.S. 
Constitution, which includes the supremacy clause [ acknowledging 
federal authority]. I don't think you can have state officials 
selling marijuana, which is illegal under federal law.

How do you think it's all going to shake out?

I was worried at the beginning there would be so many regulations and 
taxes that the licit price was going to be above the illicit price. 
Unless you can capture the market from illicit sellers, it doesn't 
matter what your regulations say.

The law requires tracking every plant, seed to sale. The problem is, 
somebody gets a license and starts growing plants Jan. 1, they're not 
ready to produce pot until April or May. Then it has to be cured, and 
they have to get it to the stores. I was worried that we were going 
to have stores open and nothing in them to sell. They've decided to 
allow people who are growing medical marijuana [ Washington approved 
medical marijuana in 1998] to register them - a path to citizenship 
for undocumented plants.

So there's going to be pot in the stores and it's going to be 
reasonably priced even after tax. Now you're going to have to worry 
about what happens when it gets too cheap, which I predict it will 
around August. Tax revenue drops. And drug abuse goes up when stuff 's cheap.

Will it be workable?

It'll work. [Now] I'm worried that it'll work too well. If the price 
falls to the point where the retail price is lower than the wholesale 
illicit price, then you'd have pot dealers from [other states] 
organizing teams of student [buyers]. In the federal government's 
list of things they were worried about, access by kids and 
out-of-state exports were two of them.

What about legalization in California?

I think we'll have an initiative by 2016. The task force writing it 
is dominated by straight-out legalizers, so we're going to get 
something that looks like Colorado's and Washington's.

Los Angeles voted this year to crack down on medical dispensaries - 
haven't the public's intentions been abused?

You'd think that, but in fact support for legalization keeps going 
up. As far as I can tell, the voter response is, "Oooh, I guess we 
legalized marijuana, didn't we, and the sky didn't fall."

As a result of changes in public opinion, I've decided all the talk 
about whether to legalize marijuana is a waste of time, so now let's 
talk about how. I always thought it was going to be complicated, 
[with] costs as well as benefits, but the costs of maintaining the 
current system are intolerably high. Twenty years ago, marijuana was 
a sixth of the illicit drug trade in this country by dollar. Now it's 
half. You've got 30 million people a year smoking. A law that 30 
million people a year break is not a good law. Where is the federal 
government in this? There's already friction over medical use, and 
now this is recreational.

The feds are going to sort of lay off Colorado and Washington insofar 
as priority enforcement areas. The Treasury [Department] still has to 
come down on whether to allow banking [to participate]. Right now 
it's a purely cash business. You can't go in with your debit card and 
buy, and the store can't have a bank account. With any luck, the 
banking regulators will issue something that tells banks, OK, you can 
open an account for these [businesses].

Is someone in the bowels of the DEA trying to figure this out?

Nope. Somewhere in the bowels of the DEA, someone is desperately 
hoping this doesn't work. They hate this like poison. Their general 
view is, no, it'll be a disaster, then people will react against it 
and we'll go back to prohibition.

Will they?

The country's not in the mood for more regulation.

This interview was edited and excerpted from a taped transcript.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom