Legal Marijuana

I live in Washington State, one of two states (the other is Colorado) that recently legalized Marijuana at the state level.  The process has been and will continue to be "very interesting".

I was a teenager in the '60s when Pot, as it is colloquially known, first became popular.  Before then a few beatniks (fringe musicians) were known to smoke Pot.  Rumor had it that it was fairly popular in what is now referred to as the "black community".  But at that time blacks were ghettoized in places like Harlem.  Unlike today, the rest of society had little overlap and contact with black culture.  So whatever was going on there was generally invisible to the culture at large.  Today blacks are trend setters in many areas of culture and trends that are incubating in the black community quickly break out into mainstream consciousness.

Anyhow, at the time there was a lot of turmoil as a result of the Civil Rights movement and later the Vietnam Antiwar movement.  Youth were feeling rebellious to an extent unimaginable today.  That led to a lot of experimentation and one of the things that got experimented on was Pot.

As part of a reaction to this unrest politicians like Richard Nixon came to prominence.  One of his themes was that the country was going to Hell and "law and order" needed to be restored.  Part of the law and order agenda was to crack down on drugs.  Pot was certainly one of the high profile drugs that Nixon and other like minded politicians went after but it was not the only one.  The other two drugs whose popularity rapidly increased were Cocaine and LSD.  Cocaine is still with us but LSD has largely faded from the scene.  So let me talk about it a little.

LSD was the first big psychoactive drug.  If you "dropped" LSD, also commonly referred to as Acid, it did strange things to your perceptions.  For some people the otherworldly experience was very enjoyable.  But for others it was very scary and horrible.  It took several years for LSD to become popular enough that a lot of people had taken it.  Once this had happened large numbers of people concluded that for enough people the bad far outweighed the good and its popularity declined, again over several years.

The LSD experience is informative.  In effect, a large scientific experiment was run.  It answered the question: is the typical experience with this drug a good one or a bad one.  This experiment was run with a large "sample size" (all the people who tried LSD) and the consensus was that the bad far outweighed the good.  And for this to be true there had to be a lot of bad.

In the last decade or so we have run a similar experiment.  In this case the drug is Methamphetamine, or "Meth" for short.  The popular form is now referred to as "Crystal Meth".  Again, one way or the other a lot of people have now taken Meth.  And the results have been similar to that of LSD.  Most people agree that on balance Meth is a bad thing.  The problem with Meth is that it appears to be very addictive.  So it appears that for whatever reason, a lot of people try Meth.  They quickly figure out it is a bad thing but it is too late.  They are addicted.  Fortunately for that previous generation, LSD was not addictive.  So when people decided it was a bad thing it disappeared pretty completely.

We have been running a much larger experiment with Pot.  Far more people have taken it.  If it was going to turn out to be another LSD, or worse yet, another Meth, we would long since all be aware of that.  But there are no large populations of Pot users suffering severe problems in our mental hospitals.  There are no "Pot heads" with severe physical problems in our regular hospitals.  There are lots of Pot smokers in our criminal justice system but few if any in our health system.  Pot is just not in a class with LSD or Meth.

Does that mean that Pot has no negative effects.  No!  But where people get into trouble is with making absolute comparisons rather than relative comparisons.  Compared to some hypothetical standard of physical, mental, and emotional health, are there negative effects associated with Pot?  Yes!  But that's the wrong comparison.  A more appropriate comparison is with tobacco and alcohol.  The process of smoking Pot is very similar to the process of smoking a tobacco cigarette.  Cigarettes are addictive because one of their main ingredients is addictive.  By some measures Nicotine is more addictive than Meth.  And the tars and other ingredients in cigarettes smoke causes lung cancer.  So cigarettes have very bad effects.  And these bad effects are well known.  Yet cigarettes are legal.

Alcohol also has many well known negative effects.  It impairs your ability to drive well.  It causes personality changes that may be very destructive.  The cost of purchasing alcohol can have a bad economic effect on a family directly through the cost of the alcoholic beverages and indirectly due to the personality changes and physical changes that may result in reduced employment or complete unemployment.

This country experimented with a legal ban on alcohol.  The many negative effects formed the basis for the case for it being outlawed.  But the result was disastrous.  Lawlessness became rampant.  Availability became even more widespread even though it was now illegal.  In this environment, the negative effects became even more pronounced compared to the old days when it was legal.  After about a decade Federal efforts to make Alcohol consumption illegal were abandoned.

The country has gone down the same path with Pot and other drugs as with alcohol.  In the late '60s a crackdown was initiated on Pot, Cocaine, and other "recreational drugs".  Part of this program involved classifying Pot as a "Schedule 1" drug.  Schedule 1 drugs are the most dangerous.  They are drugs like Meth which are both addictive and destructive.  But 50 years into our Pot science experiment it is obvious to everyone that Pot is not a Schedule 1 drug.  It is not addictive to any extent and it is not destructive either physically or mentally in the way Meth is.  It is not possible to characterize putting Pot on the Schedule 1 list or, as time has passed, keeping it on the Schedule 1 list as anything but stupid.  Based on the actual characteristics of Pot it should be in the Schedule 5 list along with cough syrups that contain small amounts of Codeine.  If you smoke Pot once a month it will have no long term effects.  But you probably shouldn't drive until the effect wears off.  If you smoke Pot frequently the negative effects will likely be similar in intensity to taking a cough syrup that contains small amounts of Codeine frequently.

Frankly, only a tiny minority of people, experts or otherwise, believe that Pot is highly dangerous, e.g. that its negative effects are on a par with Meth.  There are a large group of people, frequently heavy Pot smokers who believe that Pot is all good.  There is a very large group that believes that occasional Pot smoking is either a good thing or that the harm is small.  Many people think that even heavy Pot smoking has, at worst a small amount of negative effect.  The anti-Pot people have expended a large amount of effort ensuring that little or no large scale scientific research is done on Pot.  It turns out there is a very good reason for this.

As I said, a lot of people have smoked a lot of Pot over the years.  If there was a large negative effect associated with Pot this effect would be noticeable enough to be generally known.  But the argument I am now making is unscientific.  The conclusion is not based on properly done scientific experiments so it is suspect.  This leaves intact the argument that "there is no scientific basis for saying that Pot is reasonably safe".  More importantly, this active hostility to any scientific efforts to study Pot have meant that there is no well founded scientific research that Pot has beneficial effects.  But if we remove the phrase "well founded" from the previous statement things change drastically.  There are a number of small scientific studies that indicate that Pot makes a very good anti-nausea drug.  This is also supported by a large amount of unscientific experimentation by the general public.  Lots of people claim that Pot is a much better anti-nausea drug than anything available legally.

We have gotten ourselves into a spiral.  As a society we have invested a tremendous effort in the idea that Pot should be illegal.  We have spent fantastic amounts of money.  We have put vast numbers of people in jail solely because they smoked Pot or sold small amounts of it.  This incarceration and criminal record activity has ruined the lives of many people.  The U.S. incarcerates more people as a percentage of its population than any other country in the world.  And most of these inmates are behind bars directly or indirectly because recreational drugs are illegal.  The largest subgroup of these drug criminals are only criminals because Pot is illegal.

The U.S. had a bad experience with making alcohol illegal.  Beyond the direct effects it had a toxic effect on the criminal justice system.  There was lots of money in the booze business.  A lot of that money was deployed paying off cops, judges, lawyers, politicians, and otherwise doing harm directly to the criminal justice enterprise.  But it also harmed it indirectly.  Citizens lost trust in its operation.  And "law abiding" citizens broke the law in large numbers over and over.  The law was thrown into disrepute.

All this has happened as a result of the enforcement of the anti-Pot laws.  Drug cartels have lots of money.  It has been spent in part on bribery.  We have large numbers of "law abiding" citizens breaking the law, in many cases over and over.  And, as in the case of liquor, the effort to suppress Pot has been a complete failure.  Pot is more broadly available, at higher quality, and at lower cost, than it ever was.  The whole idea has looked stupid for a long time.

This has resulted in a novel work around.  With some evidence to support the beneficial effects of Pot we have seen a "Medical Marijuana" movement.  Washington has been one of the many states who have passed some kind of Medical Marijuana legislation.  At the state level, it is more or less legal to consume Pot "for medical purposes".  The specific rules and regulations vary considerably from state to state.  But Pot consumption, even for medical purposes is still illegal according to federal law.  This has led to some truly "Alice in Wonderland" situations.

For instance, the Washington State legislature decided that Medical Marijuana was getting out of control.  Pot dispensaries, police, pretty much everyone in the state agreed.  So the legislature set about crafting regulations to govern the Medical Marijuana business in the state.  Everything was going fine until the Feds, in the person of the local Federal Prosecutor stepped in and started making  threats.  Specifically the Federal Prosecutor threatened to throw various state employees in jail if they engaged in the activities (e.g. inspections, issuing licenses, collecting taxes, etc.) that the legislature was laying out as part of the comprehensive law.  As a direct result of this threat the Governor vetoed large parts of that law leaving a mess behind.  Her logic was flawless.  If she vetoed any less of the law she was asking state employees to perform duties that would result in them going to jail in Federal Prison.

The result of all this was that a group of people got together and created an Initiative.  The pro-Pot community was divided on the result.  They felt there were too many restrictions.  For instance, you had to be over 21, you could get a "drunk driving" type ticket if you failed a test for how much Pot you had in your system. etc.  But in the end the measure passed anyhow.  It passed largely because of the support of people like me.  I don't smoke Pot.  I'm sure I know people who smoke Pot but I don't know who they are.  But I think we need to end the insanity.  And voting to legalize Pot was something I could do.

I don't know what is going to happen next.  The Federal government has not said anything.  They haven't told the state it is OK to proceed.  They haven't told the state they will oppose implementation.  They haven't said anything.  And, trust me, a number of state officials have asked a number of Federal officials what they should expect.  So far all of the Federal officials have provided absolutely no guidance.  I think this is because no one at the Federal level has any idea how to deal with this.

In its first term, the Obama Administration has been very pro law and order.  They aggressively enforced the immigration laws until Obama issued his executive order on the "Dream" people.  The Obama Administration has not proposed any laws tightening gun laws.  In fact, they have loosened gun laws in a couple of small areas.  Threatening the Governor of our state is not the only action the Obama Administration has made on the drug front.  Generally these actions have been in the direction of more enforcement of existing drug laws.  They have gone after Medical Marijuana dispensaries and Washington State and in California that I know of.  They have not tried to move Pot from the Schedule 1 list to one of the lower schedules.

So I don't know how this is going to play out.  I know it is a good thing that two states made this move at the same time.  It removed the "it's only one nutty state" argument from the table.  Lots of states are going to be watching to see what happens.  Oregon defeated a "legalize Pot" law.  If Washington and Colorado end up having a positive experience as all this shakes down I expect Oregon to come back with a law closely modeled on the Washington or Colorado model.  And I expect it to pass.  That is likely to open the floodgates.

We need to move to making Pot legal and regulated.  Frankly, I don't know what to do with Cocaine.  It seems more dangerous and less popular to me than Pot.  But ultimately drug cartels make almost all their profits from Pot and Cocaine.  They now make a significant amount of money off of Meth.  But imagine a world where all the law enforcement effort is taken away from the current targets of Pot and Cocaine?  Vast amounts of money and, more importantly, cover will be removed from these organizations.  There is general agreement that Meth is bad stuff.  Only bad people would involve themselves in the Meth business.  So the political cover is gone.  The resources available to the cartels are vastly diminished.  And, even if we cut way back on the law enforcement resources dedicated to going after Meth, the amount of resource focused on Meth will be greater than it is now.  In that environment it might even be possible to have some success.  Once the liquor money was taken away from the mobs they became a much smaller and much more manageable problem.  And government stopped putting out a lot of money trying to stop the liquor trade and was able to bring in a lot of money in the form of taxes and fees.  There isn't enough drug money out there to single handedly close the current Federal deficit.  But a little "Pot tax" revenue wouldn't hurt.