Buzzkill

[ed. I wrote a short piece about this not too long after I-502 passed. See: Holding Our Breath.] 

One morning in August, Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at U.C.L.A., addressed the Seattle city council on the subject of marijuana. Kleiman is one of the country’s most prominent and outspoken analysts of drug policy, and for three decades he has argued that America’s cannabis laws must be liberalized. Kleiman’s campaign used to seem quixotic, but in November, 2012, voters in Washington and Colorado passed initiatives legalizing the use and commercial sale of marijuana. Immediately afterward, the State of Washington decided that it needed help setting up a pot economy. State bureaucrats don’t generally sit around pondering the improbable, so they had made no contingency plans. A call for proposals was issued. Kleiman assembled a team that beat out more than a hundred other contenders for the job. He calls himself a “policy entrepreneur,” and offers advice through a consultancy that he runs, botec Analysis Corp. In a nod to the ambiguity inherent in studying illicit economies, botec stands for Back of the Envelope Calculation.

Washington and Colorado have launched a singular experiment. The Netherlands tolerates personal use of marijuana, but growing or selling the drug is still illegal. Portugal has eliminated criminal sanctions on all forms of drug use, but selling narcotics remains a crime. Washington and Colorado are not merely decriminalizing adult possession and use of cannabis; they are creating a legal market for the drug that will be overseen by the state. In a further complication, the marijuana that is legal in these states will remain illegal in the eyes of the federal government, because the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 forbids the growing and selling of cannabis. “What the state is doing, in actuality, is issuing licenses to commit a felony,” Kleiman says. In late August, after months of silence, the Department of Justice announced that it will not intervene to halt the initiatives in Washington and Colorado. Instead, it will adopt a “trust but verify” approach, permitting the states to police the new market for the drug. Many other states appear poised to introduce legalization measures, and the Obama Administration’s apparent acquiescence surely will hasten this development.

Washington’s initiative, called I-502, received fifty-six per cent of the vote, with especially strong support in western Washington, around Seattle. Voters saw a lot to like: the end of prohibition of a drug that many people enjoy and consider harmless; a fresh source of tax revenue; an end to the punitive, and racially discriminatory, enforcement of marijuana laws. Each year, U.S. authorities make more than three-quarters of a million arrests for marijuana offenses. Blacks are more than three times as likely to be arrested for such offenses as whites are, though they are no more likely to use the drug. Pete Holmes, the city attorney of Seattle, told me that state prosecutors had stopped indicting people for marijuana possession, because local jurors found the prohibition so objectionable that they tended to acquit on principle. A few years ago, Holmes stopped prosecuting misdemeanor marijuana-possession cases. He then publicly endorsed I-502.

The law, which was sixty-four pages long and contained hundreds of specific provisions, assigned the liquor-control board the role of regulating the pot market. Yet many difficult questions remained: Who would be allowed to grow legal marijuana? Who would be allowed to sell it? How much would an ounce of legal pot cost? The legislation gave Washington officials only a year to come up with answers. Randy Simmons, the state’s project manager for I-502, says, “From the week after the initiative passed, it’s been about a hundred and fifty miles an hour.”

The liquor-control board instructed Kleiman and his associates at botec to submit research papers outlining the advantages and disadvantages of rival approaches to legalization. They were to be paid two hundred and ninety-two dollars an hour. In the spring and summer, Kleiman’s team engaged in the often surreal enterprise of conducting market research on a black market: producing reports on the number of active marijuana users in each county; estimating how many retail cannabis outlets would be needed to serve that population; assessing how various tax schemes might affect the price of the drug. They also investigated protocols for “product quality standards and testing.” Kleiman’s mandate was to offer officials options, rather than prescriptions. But he has a lot of opinions, and does not excel at hiding them.

If Seattle has welcomed the legalization of marijuana with utopian optimism—a conviction that Washington’s experiment will eventually sweep the nation—then Kleiman can seem like a total downer. Allergic to cant, he speaks with the bracing candor of a scientist in a disaster movie, and appears to derive grim pleasure from informing politicians that they have underestimated the complexity of a problem.

by Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Maureen Drennan