When Washington State needed advice on how to set up a market for legal marijuana, they called UCLA professor Mark Kleiman. Here, Kleiman discusses the future of legalized pot with Ezra Klein.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mark Kleiman: Continued prohibition is probably the worst thing we could do about cannabis right now. Alcohol style legalization, which is where we're headed, is probably the second worse. If we had a national debate now we might settle on a temperate cannabis policy. That would get us the benefits of legalization without an upsurge in heavy use and use by juveniles.
Without a national solution – a national framework for safe cannabis policy – we're going to wind up going down the road we went down with alcohol. We'll have commercial sale, low taxes, loose regulation. That's a bad place to be for alcohol. It's not as bad a place to be for cannabis, but it's the worse place we could be.
Ezra Klein: Why is it a dumb idea to regulate Cannabis in the states?
Mark: A lot of the things you might want to do as a state government you can't do while it remains federally illegal. Each state is hostage to all the other states. If Washington wanted to have tight restrictions and high taxes and Oregon wanted to have loose restrictions and low taxes, guess what happens? Lots of Oregon pot floods Washington.
We'll get a race to the bottom. With tobacco, now New York State and particularly New York City have very high tobacco taxes. But something like a third of all the cigarettes sold in New York City are smuggled. Not from Leningrad, but from Virginia. It's really hard to stop that stuff.
An ounce of cannabis on the illicit market or in the medical stores now costs around $300. A pack of cigarettes can easily weigh just about one ounce. New York City and state are trying to collect $8.00 on a pack of cigarettes and substantially failing. So now try to collect $300.00 on an ounce of cannabis.
I think burning plant leaves and flowers and breathing the smoke is going to be completely out of fashion in ten years along with burning tobacco leaves.
I think we're going to go entirely e-cigarette for both markets. One of the consequences is that's much easier to smuggle because concentrate is much more compact than herbal cannabis. Collecting state level taxes on this may be really hard if there's any substantial state gradients. It's a little weird to be giving state licenses to commit federal felonies. It will be nice to have a legally sane system. (...)
Ezra: Why do you think cannabis concentrate is going to become so dominant in ten years? I'm curious about that.
Mark: A number of reasons. Most people don't like to cough.
Ezra: We should say concentrate is when you've essentially extracted the active ingredient.
Mark: There are a number of different technologies for taking cannabis flowers and leave sand extracting from them the active agents. Not just the THC but the 90 other chemicals that are in there. Then it's put in a variety of forms. There's a liquid form that can go into something like an e-cigarette. There's also a solid, sort of waxy form that can go into a different kind of vaporizer.
In any case you've got some device that applies external heat to the concentrate and you breathe the vapor as opposed to the current technology which is you burn the plant matrix in order to vaporize the active agent and breath the smoke. Well, come on guys, breathing smoke's not a good idea and it's no fun. I think people, particularly people who only use it occasionally, will pay extra not to cough. The more advanced vaporization devices will actually deliver a measured puff which a joint really can't or a pipe really can't.
If you had a measured puff of a tested concentrate you could actually know how many milligrams you're getting to your brain. You could actually control your cannabis use in a halfway reasonable way as much as you can control your drinking experience by having some number of drinks. If you have three drinks, you know what that does to you. You can't really know that with cannabis now. The product is too different. The smoking behaviors is too different. It's not really reproducible. I think concentrates will take care of that.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mark Kleiman: Continued prohibition is probably the worst thing we could do about cannabis right now. Alcohol style legalization, which is where we're headed, is probably the second worse. If we had a national debate now we might settle on a temperate cannabis policy. That would get us the benefits of legalization without an upsurge in heavy use and use by juveniles.Without a national solution – a national framework for safe cannabis policy – we're going to wind up going down the road we went down with alcohol. We'll have commercial sale, low taxes, loose regulation. That's a bad place to be for alcohol. It's not as bad a place to be for cannabis, but it's the worse place we could be.
Ezra Klein: Why is it a dumb idea to regulate Cannabis in the states?
Mark: A lot of the things you might want to do as a state government you can't do while it remains federally illegal. Each state is hostage to all the other states. If Washington wanted to have tight restrictions and high taxes and Oregon wanted to have loose restrictions and low taxes, guess what happens? Lots of Oregon pot floods Washington.
We'll get a race to the bottom. With tobacco, now New York State and particularly New York City have very high tobacco taxes. But something like a third of all the cigarettes sold in New York City are smuggled. Not from Leningrad, but from Virginia. It's really hard to stop that stuff.
An ounce of cannabis on the illicit market or in the medical stores now costs around $300. A pack of cigarettes can easily weigh just about one ounce. New York City and state are trying to collect $8.00 on a pack of cigarettes and substantially failing. So now try to collect $300.00 on an ounce of cannabis.
I think burning plant leaves and flowers and breathing the smoke is going to be completely out of fashion in ten years along with burning tobacco leaves.
I think we're going to go entirely e-cigarette for both markets. One of the consequences is that's much easier to smuggle because concentrate is much more compact than herbal cannabis. Collecting state level taxes on this may be really hard if there's any substantial state gradients. It's a little weird to be giving state licenses to commit federal felonies. It will be nice to have a legally sane system. (...)
Ezra: Why do you think cannabis concentrate is going to become so dominant in ten years? I'm curious about that.
Mark: A number of reasons. Most people don't like to cough.
Ezra: We should say concentrate is when you've essentially extracted the active ingredient.
Mark: There are a number of different technologies for taking cannabis flowers and leave sand extracting from them the active agents. Not just the THC but the 90 other chemicals that are in there. Then it's put in a variety of forms. There's a liquid form that can go into something like an e-cigarette. There's also a solid, sort of waxy form that can go into a different kind of vaporizer.
In any case you've got some device that applies external heat to the concentrate and you breathe the vapor as opposed to the current technology which is you burn the plant matrix in order to vaporize the active agent and breath the smoke. Well, come on guys, breathing smoke's not a good idea and it's no fun. I think people, particularly people who only use it occasionally, will pay extra not to cough. The more advanced vaporization devices will actually deliver a measured puff which a joint really can't or a pipe really can't.
If you had a measured puff of a tested concentrate you could actually know how many milligrams you're getting to your brain. You could actually control your cannabis use in a halfway reasonable way as much as you can control your drinking experience by having some number of drinks. If you have three drinks, you know what that does to you. You can't really know that with cannabis now. The product is too different. The smoking behaviors is too different. It's not really reproducible. I think concentrates will take care of that.
by Ezra Klein, Vox | Read more:
Image: Kevin Cummins / Getty Images
