Pot: Why not legalize it?

globeandmail.com: Pot: Why not legalize it?
Sounds swell – until you think about it. Then the problems start. Here’s one. What about the kids? Do we really want a lot more 15-year-olds getting stoned? Okay, we could prohibit pot for minors. Can you explain why that would work any better than it does with booze and cigarettes?

This question supposes that a whole lot more kids would use pot if it were legal.  When 83.9% of high school seniors say it’s “fairly easy” or “very easy” to get pot, it makes me think that all the kids who want to try pot already are.  Nearly 42% of them in the US report having used marijuana at least once in their lives and the government estimates 5% of them are regular pot smokers.

But let’s suppose a few kids do find a way around the ban on minors, like they do for cigarettes and booze.  At least now they are getting a hold of a regulated product, free from adulterants and measured for precise levels of THC and CBD.  Whoever illegally purchased that marijuana for the minors just contributed money to the state through taxes, part of which will go to underaged marijuana treatment, education, and prevention programs like we do for cigarettes and booze.  Plus we’ve created a system where a kid can’t just visit another kid to get weed, he must find one adult who will buy it from another adult, in a store where IDs are checked and purchases are videotaped.  More hurdles to clear to get weed and more evidence for prosecution if we catch him.

That’s just one of the vexed questions raised by UCLA professor Mark Kleiman, one of the more thoughtful experts on drug policy today. Basically, he’s a liberal. “Criminal punishment of marijuana use does not appear to be justified,” he maintains. But legalization has big problems too. “Full commercial legalization of cannabis, on the model now applied to alcohol, would vastly increase the cannabis-abuse problem by giving the marketing geniuses who have done such a fine job persuading children to smoke tobacco, drink to excess and super-size themselves another vice to foster,” he argues.

Legalization of cannabis for adults doesn’t necessarily allow wholesale commercial advertising of marijuana.  As Chris Rock once said, “you don’t sell drugs – drugs sell themselves.”  I can see no reason why in a legal marijuana paradigm we don’t maintain prohibition against its advertisement.  For years we allowed tobacco advertising in print, TV, and sporting events; now we don’t and it’s helped drive down teen smoking.  On the other hand, we’ve recently relaxed the rules on advertising hard liquor, a drug that kills thousands each year, especially young people involved in binge drinking.

Legalizing pot would surely drive up use – and abuse. That’s why rates of alcohol abuse are so high. Alcohol abuse – and rates of liver disease – hit bottom during Prohibition. Nor is pot completely harmless, even though I am sure that you, dear reader, handle it just fine. It’s three times stronger than it used to be and, for a minority of people, it’s very bad indeed.

Homicide rates peaked during Prohibition and declined after its repeal.  Replacing the liver disease of those who choose to drink for murders of cops and innocent bystanders wasn’t a very good trade.

The twelve states that have decriminalized cannabis have not seen their rates of use increase, and in the twelve states that have legalized medical use, their teenage rates of cannabis use have decreased.  In the Netherlands, where cannabis use is quasi-legal, adult and teen use rates are half that of the United States

Okay, so the government could regulate it. And how would that work? Would we have CCBOs or B.C. Cannabis Stores? Would they hand out a glossy magazine with alluring product shots? Would unionized clerks dispense advice on the best bong for your buck? Or maybe they’d run it like the lottery, and hire really good ad agencies to produce compulsive gamblers.

Again, why would you have to hire an ad agency?  Here’s my bet: if you legalized cannabis sales in liquor stores and mentioned it just once on the evening news, you would never again have to say a single word about it and those stores would continue doing fantastic business until the end of time.

“What you might call the political economy of drug legalization is a bigger problem than the legalizers seem to grasp,” Mr. Kleiman has said. “Either we will have a private industry whose profits depend on creating and maintaining addicts, or we will have a public bureaucracy whose revenues depend on creating and maintaining addicts.”

Under Kleiman’s reasoning, the only way Budweiser stays in business is because of alcoholics.  According to the Institutes of Medicine, “Compared to most other drugs … dependence among marijuana users is relatively rare.” Only 9% of marijuana users develop a clinical dependence, compared to 15% of alcohol users and 32% of tobacco users.  Nobody talks about the government closing state-run liquor stores or returning tobacco lawsuit settlement cash because those revenues depend on addicts.

We could always lock it up behind the counter and plaster it with warning signs. But there’s still the problem of supply. Who gets to grow it? How much THC content should it have? What should the profit margins be?

Who grows it?  How potent?  What margins?  How do we answer all these questions with respect to alcohol and tobacco?   How is it an easy question to answer for the drugs that lead 3-to-6-out-of-20 of its users to severe physical life-threatening addiction, the drugs that kill half a million a year, but it’s a tough question for the drug that kills no one and might lead less than 2-in-20 of its users into a mild psychological dependence?

If we tax the hell out of it, why won’t illegal dealers sell it cheaper down the street?

I understand that alcohol and cigarettes face some of the highest taxation in the nation, yet I can’t recall meeting any illegal beer and whiskey dealers selling it cheaper down the street.  (This is where the prohibitionist says, “Yeah, but brewing is hard.  Anybody can grow marijuana and sell it cheap!”  And I reply, “You’ve obviously never tried to grow any consumer-grade marijuana.”)

There can be a point where “sin taxes” can be over-applied.  In the case of cigarettes, draconian taxes in Manhattan have spurred on a lucrative cigarette smuggling business from low-tobacco-tax states like Virginia.  The solution there is to set the tax on cannabis equally throughout the states.

Here’s the thing prohibitionists never think about: it’s all about supply and demand.  Prohibition adds risk and scarcity to the supply of marijuana, but doesn’t decrease demand.  So marijuana is very pricey and the huge profits in an illegal market add all the violence and corruption.

But marijuana is literally a weed.  If it were legal, so much of it could be grown that the supply would be nearly inexhaustable.  The demand would still be roughly the same, so the price would come down dramatically.  There wouldn’t be enough profit in it for a small-time dealer; you’d have to grow and sell in bulk commercially, like a lettuce farmer.