Things most voters don't understand about marijuana legalization
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Things to know…
These bills take away a family's right to live in pot-free communities.
Most of the time, the burden of legalization falls onto the local community. It takes a long time for cities and counties to understand how commercialized pot works - resulting in slow-to-materialize protections for their communities, if protections show up at all.
The marijuana industry and pro-drug voices in our country have deep pockets, are politically sophisticated and well-versed in messaging campaigns that make marijuana seem both harmless and helpful. At a population-level - it is neither.
When passed via ballot initiative by voters, the marijuana industry is not accountable to anyone or any party including state legislators - amplifying the difficulty most states experience in regulating the industry.
States that have passed laws permitting medicinal use have not installed real or extensive research requirements to determine marijuana's efficacy for the various conditions for which it's allowed. This is the role of the FDA; this protection is lost when a state legalizes for medicinal use. When a state fails to replicate this function, public health is left in a precarious state.
The revenue promised by legalization efforts has yet to cover the costs of legalization in any state that has passed these laws.
There is a predictable pro-drug progression in politics today:
Marijuana legalization for medicinal use usually comes first,
Followed by legalization for recreational use, and
Now we see campaigns for all drugs. In 2020 Oregon voters, who approved recreational use of marijuana in 2013, will vote to effectively legalize all drugs. Denver-ites legalized psilocybin (mushrooms) last year.
Additional points to contemplate…
It’s counter-intuitive, but legalization requires massive increases in law enforcement – here’s what’s happening:
A state is asking black market operators – seasoned veterans that have been in a market for decades and working in the shadows for conventional law and regulation - to shift into the more expensive, more time consuming world of oversight and regulation. It’s not clear if the boots-on-the-ground industry-folks are in favor of the legalization measures being passed in their states or intend to comply. Additionally, the existing customer base is well-versed in how to find their product and suppliers. Just because a state legalizes, there is no motivation for this illicit industry to step into the new framework and there is little motivation for seasoned customers to begin paying 20-30% more (via imposed taxes) for the same product they bought yesterday. Also, the black market now enjoys the veil of legalization that makes their covert operations harder to detect. Eighty-five percent of California’s marijuana industry is still operating outside California’s legal framework – only 15% percent have applied for state licensing and therefore state legitimacy after 4 years.
The current marijuana supply chain in your state is run mostly by criminal organizations - current marijuana operators are not typically the local mom & pop hardware store folks. Some operators are connected to the community through family and schools, for example, but a majority of operators are part of regional and enterprise crime organizations. These are sophisticated organizations that require equally sophisticated disruption if they resist joining a state’s new infrastructure.
Law enforcement, the threat of shut down and delivery on that treat, is the only way to force many into the new framework and is only accomplished through well-funded and well-organized criminal justice structures – to that end, in addition to law enforcement officers, a robust investigation corps and judicial personnel are required to efficiently facilitate any of this. Then once initial compliance has been established, which means your black market has converted to the legal legislative framework (FYI - this has not been achieved to any significant degree in any rec-legal state to date), then the work of ongoing compliance, correct tax payments, and insuring these players are not slipping back into shadow-based operations is critical.
Police forces across all legal states tell stories of chronic off-book accounting by legal operators, human trafficking rings they accidentally run across in the course of checking in with legitimate operators, etc. The point being, the consistency and vigilance required to convert an illegal market to a legal market place and maintain it cannot be underestimated. The alcohol industry has been actively and aggressively managed by law enforcement since the repeal of alcohol prohibition. States have failed to make this connection and learn from it.
If the black market is allowed to endure, the legal market never really happens – So what if a state goes into legalization without the enforcement dollars and/or organization that are really required? Well simply put, their black market competes with their legal market and the black market wins the day on lower cost and greater market expertise in most cases. This is happening in every legal state. Your existing enforcement corps will also become less efficient as you burn out officers, and resources spent will accomplish less – officers in legal states complain of the inefficient churn they endure with chronic under-funding - an example: illegal retail store (dispensary) opens on one block – law enforcement shuts it down, to realize it popped back up two blocks over, one week later – they don’t have the resources to deal with that pop up.
States that allow the use of medical marijuana for any medical condition, should set up state-level departments that function like the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA). To date, over 40 states allow some form of medical marijuana, however, no state has replaced the FDA’s function of requiring real and extensive testing to determine drug efficacy. In our country, claims made about the medicinal properties of a product are only allowed if testing validates them. The FDA assesses research to determine if claims being made about a product are true. In this century, only one manufacturer of marijuana-based products intended to be used as medicine has conducted the required research to validate its claims (GW Pharmaceuticals; Epidolex was approved in 2018 and is available via prescription through a regular pharmacy). All claims of efficacy about dispensary-available marijuana to date are anecdotal (not research tested) - this is a precarious thing to do to public health.
Political processes are co-opted at least in part by the marijuana industry in states that legalize. The industry is well funded and hyper-motivated. Increasingly it pours money into political races and puts its candidates up for committee work throughout a state’s marijuana infrastructure. Rather quickly really, state governments become pro-pot and legislate heavily in favor of the industry. People will argue this is just politics, however in politics there are typically two sides. In the marijuana discussion there is really only one-side. Public health sits on the other side of pro-pot. It is unfunded, has no profit motivator or source and is poorly organized.
Another fun fact is that the marijuana industry can be extremely litigious and has the money to be so. Legislatures will do the hard work of putting together and approving various guidelines for managing legal marijuana (at all levels, state, city and county) to have the industry start filing law suits against those guidelines (even ones they may have helped create) soon after passing them.
Data collection frameworks become more important - ideally a framework that covers all kinds of indicators is defined and put in place years before legalization implementation so baseline data can be established. One critical data component is the updating and funding of consistent and comprehensive tox-screening across a state (in all counties). Again, ideally requirements are stringent and consistent across all locales, but at a minimum poly-drug testing that includes THC is looked for in all fatal situations and preferably all violent-crime situations. FYI – no legal states are doing this well, if at all.
Budgetary planning is generally not well anticipated– law enforcement and data collection alone will cost the state much more than marijuana tax revenue will cover. The state must understand this and plan accordingly for all the other unfunded realities of marijuana legalization, like increases in hospitalizations, substance abuse services, homelessness, mental illness services, and many more not covered in this discussion. If not, public health further deteriorates (i.e. increases in youth use, etc), civil society further erodes (i.e. increases in homelessness, etc), and unrelated programs begin experiencing unexplained and potentially dangerous budget cuts to cover the increased costs of legalization.
