The biggest obstacles to formal pot legalization are the types of people arguing most vehemently for pot legalization.
- Me, on Twitter (April 15, 2009)
Of the myriad disingenuous arguments for marijuana legalization made over the years, none is less credible, and more embarrassing, than the present claim that rolling back its prohibition would create a desperately needed windfall in tax revenue for states regulating its sale. The dumbest position yet. Dumber than the medicinal marijuana argument that has anyone claiming anxiety, sciatica or swimmer’s ear walking out of “clinics” in California with bags of Blueberry Indica. Dumber than that nonsense your pony-tailed uncle spews about how hemp is superior to nylon – how we can build radial tires for Peterbilts from it we wanted to. “The Swedish do it, man… Or was that the Finns? I always mix them up. Which one’s the island?”
Have you tried to make Champagne lately? Vodka? How about a nice Bourbon? Can’t do it, can you? But if you could, you would. Who’d ever go to the liquor store again if he could brew Basil Hayden’s or Perrier Jouet in his basement? And that’s exactly what’ll happen if the states legalize dope.
Everybody you know who’s smoked pot in the past or continues to recreationally use it today – roughly a quarter and a fifth of the people you’ve met under 50, respectively – would start up a garden or grow room in his house. Neighbors would swap strains of Sativa at coffee klatches the way they swap tuna casserole recipes. And that tax gain to the states? Minimal, if anything. A slight bump from the shoppers looking for super premium stuff only a large retailer could import. Or lazy jackasses like me who don’t know shit about gardening.
But it’s not the imbecilic economics of the argument that make it so offensive. The thing that makes this pitch so horrendous is it’s a clear, pathetic pretext. If you support the concept of legalization as an issue of personal liberty… If you believe that we don’t have a Bill of Affirmative Rights and Entitlements, but a Bill of Limitations on How Much Government Can Interfere in What Ought to be Private, Personal Decisions… And if you believe in having a society of people who take personal responsibility for those decisions, then you’re smart enough to realize that this type of Trojan Horse argument ducks a long overdue conversation America needs to be having with itself.
As well meaning or effective as they might be, pretexts are sleazy arguments. Something hired liars use in courtrooms, lobbyists stuff into talking point memos and television ministers spit from the pulpit as “1-800-GIV-2GOD” flashes on the megachurch’s Jumbotron. They’re what you say you’re doing when you can’t say what you’re actually doing because what you’re actually doing is dumb, solely self-interested or malevolent. They’re also embarrassingly obvious. Anybody with a child’s appreciation for the art of debate can spot a pretext coming a mile away. And no, the fact that the other side’s position is a fraud doesn’t give you license to offer an equally false response, particularly in regard to an issue as important as personal freedom.
Why? Because all a pretext does, all it can ever do, is degrade and confuse the debate, invite the usual crowd of scolds, zero tolerance zealots and nanny state teetotalers to offer equally disingenuous arguments. That or the pretext’s dim, but often effective counterpart – the “Slippery Slope” rebuttal:
“Legalize marijuana and we’ll be substantially closer to balancing California’s budget!”
“But–but–but if we allow that, then the people will use ecstasy, and then cocaine, and when they get bored with that they’ll go on to LSD, and then they’ll go on to PCP and heroin and as the older people become junkies the children will have no guidance and the users will get younger and younger and we’ll have it in the high schools! We’ll have the PCP and the LSD and the heroin, and grade schoolers will be sniffing the Angel Dust! I know what happens with this! I grew up in the Sixties and my sister followed the Jefferson Starship and she was never the same and you might think it’s harmless but when it comes to your third grader with methamphetamines, you tell me– tell me! Who will think of the children!”*
Never underestimate the power of an hysteric’s imagination. They may not be much for facts or logic, but they can whip up doomsday scenario PR attacks faster than Simon Cowell can fart one hit wonders onto the pop charts.
The only real reason marijuana should be legal is because there’s no good reason it shouldn’t be. None other than Richard Nixon’s own National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse – the most exhaustive study of the drug and its societal and health implications to date – found a prohibitive approach was neither warranted nor wise:**
On the basis of our findings, discussed in previous Chapters, we have concluded that society should seek to discourage use, while concentrating its attention on the prevention and treatment of heavy and very heavy use. The Commission feels that the criminalization of possession of marihuana for personal is socially self-defeating as a means of achieving this objective.
That’s the only argument anyone should ever make from the pro-legalization side. Yes, most of life is doublespeak, and yes, we have to manipulate parliamentary procedures and spin bullshit to get a lot of what we want in this world, particularly in the cesspool of politics. But truth – logical, sensible truth – that has a way of sticking in people’s synapses when they hear it, the same way a pretext conversely makes us gag.***
And on an issue as important as our personal freedoms and the responsibility that goes with them, we ought to have absolute clarity. These debates shouldn’t be mired in specious or guarded arguments that avoid the central issues. One of the main reasons this country’s as fucked as it is right now is that for years our government has spoken to the population like children. Aimed it’s every policy at the lowest common denominator among us using the unspoken, obvious justification that most Americans need to be coddled, herded, protected from their own decisions. This makes a public soft-headed and dependent on one hand, deluded and absurd on the other:
“My loan resets and I can’t afford it? It’s the bank’s fault! The papers were too hard to read!”
“I’m not getting a bonus for packaging and selling mortgage backed securities this year? It’s Obama’s fault! He’s a Socialist!”
The only cure for this pervasive stupidity is frankness – treating the public like adults. The way John McCain did when he told Michigan, “Your jobs aren’t coming back.” The way Obama did when he said to Notre Dame, “Roe v. Wade isn’t going anywhere, so let’s cut the sermonizing and hyperbole on both sides of this debate, act like rational people and find some common ground.”
In a non-dysfunctional republic, he’d do the same on the marijuana issue:
Fellow citizens, I’ve called this press conference, my fourth this week, to announce a change in a long standing government policy. Marijuana will be removed from the list of Schedule One drugs, effective immediately. It is no longer illegal.
Now, before you take positions on this, and I know this is a divisive issue for some, let me say this. Many in this country have smoked marijuana, and it has not impeded their ability to succeed and contribute to our society. Michael Bloomberg, Arnold Swarzenegger and Bill Clinton… Bing Crosby, Norman Mailer and Bill Walton… Cary Grant, Carl Sagan and Mike Wallace… Yes, the geriatric Mike Wallace from 60 Minutes. John F. Kennedy, Robert “The Chief” Parish and me, the President… Just to name a few. We’ve all smoked marijuana.
And we’ve enjoyed it.
It’s not a gateway drug unless you want it to be one, in which case everything’s a gateway drug, and anything you use will lead to something else. It won’t make you violent or demented, it’s not a tenth as addictive as alcohol and, save a couple who drove their Vespa under the wheels of an oncoming burrito van in the parking lot of a Phish concert in 2001, we are aware of no deaths directly attributable to marijuana.
And really, let’s come down to brass tacks on this issue. If you’re the kind of person who will ruin your life with marijuana, you’d have ruined it with something else. Blown off a limb playing with firecrackers… driven a hot-rodded Scion into a bridge abutment on a headful of malt liquor… turned yourself into a paraplegic diving from the roof of a trailer into an above ground swimming pool. Some people are just stupid. It was fine to take care of you when we were rich, but in these dire times, we can ill afford to keep wasting government resources protecting you from yourselves. That’s Darwin’s jurisdiction.
Good night, God bless and, well… smoke it if you’ve got it.
Before anyone cites the law of unintended circumstances for me, yes, I understand that legalizing marijuana will put a lot of taxpayers involved in the Drug War out of work. But I have a solution for that. If we need to make something illegal in its place to make up for the lost tax revenue from those laid off DEA agents, court personnel and prison guards, I say we start taxing every use of a pretext in legislative debate on Capitol Hill.
This seems impossible on the surface, I know. But it’s actually pretty simple. All we need to do is hire a Wall Street quant. Have him fashion a model that scans the Congressional Record, locating every misrepresentation, lie of omission and stalking horse argument in its text. And enforcement? That’s a cinch. The pot of money for the tax is right under the IRS’s nose. Deduct it directly from the legislators’ campaign war chests – the ones they’d otherwise use to go on two week fact-finding junkets to the Old Course at St. Andrews or trade missions to Gstaad and Monte Carlo.
That, friends, would be one hell of a lucrative tax.
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* Because all drugs are the same, of course. Marijuana will absolutely make you want to try cocaine, PCP and acid. They’re near identical buzzes, attracting exactly the same types of users.
** Nixon’s response to the report? “Bury it.”
*** When we concede a logical truth’s plain expression in favor of connivances, we dodge the meat of the dispute, leaving the issue unresolved, and each of the warring factions to continue believing they’re right. If there’s never an “elitism” of ideas, a determination that one position is better than another, there’s no enlightenment accruing to anyone from the debate, at least not on any productive timetable. The defeated don’t think about what was defective in their position. They just chalk up the “loss” to bad strategy and regroup to fight another day.
Well said.
PL: Thanks. I used to think pretexts were a grease that kept society moving, but I’m beginning to wonder how much faster, more efficiently and less annoyingly things would go without so many of them.
I reckon this goes hand in hand with your Tweet about charging the losing counsel in a trial with perjury. I agree with both.
PL: A “loser pays” system is long overdue in this country. It needed to happen a decade ago. Lawyers can no more self police than investment bankers could.
Despite the fact I’ve never smoked anything, nor taken any recreational drug of any kind in my life (not even alcohol), I am vehemently pro-marijuana legalization for exactly the reasons you stated above. Thank you for saying it better than I ever could, and giving me excellent ways to respond to the crazy people.
PL: And thank you for being open minded. If we had more sober, open-minded people involved in this debate, rather than the zero tolerance zealots on one side, and “Legalize it, now!” urban rastafarians on the other, this discussion would probably have progressed in a much more positive direction years ago.
Stoners who view dope as a lifestyle (dress, talk, etc..) are the best ads for continued criminalization. They’re like the drag queens and bikers in gay pride parades screaming for gay rights. If you want to bend Main Street to your views, you have to bend a little yourself, and with something like dope, that starts with acknowledging, it’s just a drug. Not a lifestyle. Not a central hub from which all other spokes in your life emanate. That it’s a recreational thing, like having beers with a friend after work. Nothing more, nothing less. That may offend some people who want a “movement” to belong to, but I’d say this to them – get a life.
Pretext aside your argument doesn’t differentiate between legalization and decriminalization. I don’t mean to be splitting hairs here but there is something to be said for allowing commercial production and private growing. there are currently strict laws on brewing beer and wine at home and hard alcohol production is forbidden. beyond this point most of us are lazy in the way we get our intoxicants. Most of us don’t brew our own beer even though it is legal and fairly easy to do. Aside from that there is a large social stigma that surrounds weed. Even without the tax argument buying a few joints and smoking them in the privacy of your own family room is fair and away removed from having 10 plants in your backyard for all your neighbors to see.
PL: There’s not much stigma about weed at all. Among some social conservatives even, it’s not viewed very negatively. Perhaps that’s a coastal snob’s position – viewing the issue pragmatically and maturely. I’m sure there are some ardent social conservatives and law and order types in pockets of society who still view the plant as a serious crime, but I doubt that faction is growing, or even holding. I think the sole stigmatizing factor is its present criminalization. Remove that and any remaining stigma evaporates among thinking people. In fact, if legalized, my guess is it would be a novelty item for all types of people for a little while, after which interest in it would fade and it would become about as popular as any other regulated intoxicant.
I’m not touching the home brewing argument because I think you understand that the analogy doesn’t fit. Making hooch is a lot harder than growing dope. That’s why people don’t do it – not because the law prohibits it.
PhilaLawyer, I overall agree with your argument. I think personal freedoms, the lack of harm that pot does, etc. are the key motivating factors for the need to legalise it (something I think will happen in the next few decades as the older generation die off and the people who have tried it, enjoyed it and not driven off a cliff or headed down the rabbit hole to Methtopia will become the majority). I think very few people with any sense, reason or logic can justify it being illegal these days.
However, I disagree with your initial premise, that it won’t create a tax boon because people will grow their own. People can make their own beer and wine, but don’t (because the quality is better with the stuff you buy). People could make their own pizza more quickly, more cheaply, and likely to a higher standard of quality at home, but Pizza Hut has 34,000 stores in 100 countries. Ditto for canned soups, vegetable and herb gardens, etc. etc. Ditto for repairing your bicycle, ditto for home repairs and painting. Hell, I can assemble my own Windows-compatible PC for a fraction of the cost that Dell, Sony or HP charge (and with minimal easily-Googleable knowhow). People pay for a guarantee of quality, and people pay for convenience. If you could pop to the supermarket and pick up a dime bag while you were getting your milk (and, presumably, 12 bags of Doritos), most people would do so. Especially if the economies of scale made it fairly cheap. So I think the tax revenue is a valid point. People are lazy and creatures of habit and you never go broke counting on that.
You could also criminalise the growing of it for sale without a license (the way I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to run an unregulated tobacco farm or distillery). That’d give people an added incentive by making it cheap and legal to buy from the supermarket or slightly cheaper, but illegal to buy from their neighbour.
I want to be clear: I agree wholeheartedly with your overall point on pretexts, and I certainly think that personal freedom and liberty is the primary reason for legalisation. But I think tax revenues are a secondary one.
PL: We can agree to disagree on that. You make a valid point. My only comment would be that criminalizing home production would fail, I think, because enforcement is near impossible. It’s just too easy to make.
“…using the unspoken, obvious justification that most Americans need to be coddled, herded, protected from their own decisions.”
Exactly. You put it perfectly into words — how do people not have a problem with this? It’s assumed and accepted that no amount of control is too much for the protection of our soft brains. I’ve flipped out so many times when I see a retarded something “for our safety,” and the people around me roll their eyes and say it’s a problem with authority.
I don’t understand how this happened, though. How did our culture get to this place? How can we ever get away from it?
PL: We’re getting there. We can’t borrow forever. Inevitably, the endless safety nets and bailout structures will be exhausted. We’re not headed into a collectivist future. We’re heading into a ruthlessly competitive one.
While it would be wonderful to strip away all pretext and simply say “Marijuana isn’t terribly harmful, let it be (lord, let it be)” it’s a sure way to defeat.
Because pretext is what makes the world turn, the money flow, and my margarita taste this sweet. People don’t want to hear the truth, because often the truth is an unpleasent thing, and the instant you say an unpleasent thing you are the enemy.
Without misdirection, you lose in the court of public opinion. And I’d like to think reasonable people would prevail, but they wouldn’t. Ever. Because reasonable people (to paraphrase the hitchhiker’s guide) simply do not care that much. It wouldn’t be reasonable. People would flock to the defense of a sensible argument, sure, and the instant they saw the kind of fanaticism arrayed in opposition–they would cave.
In a perfect world, being in the right would be sufficient. But in a perfect world, I’d be trading in this coffee cup on a friday morning for scotch and enough money to retire.
PL: That isn’t a reason not to try. I’m quite cynical and use pretexts as much as the next guy in business issues. But when we accept the pretext as our standard way of doing business, it has a way of becoming reality for a lot of people. You and I might see it and know how it’s being used, and I might like to joke here about how any child can spot a pretext, but as they continue to be our default form of debate and communication, a fair number of people who don’t read the details begin to buy them whole hog. There’s no harm and much to be gained from at least flooding the marketplace with information dispelling the myths these pretexts tend to create. A real debate educates, and generally, we’re sorely in need of that.
I really hope your right. But the all the evidence I’ve seen points to many people being so stupid or apathetic that all they care about is how much their taxes are.
PL: Well, then the tax argument will work. It’d be nice to reach a consensus based on consideration of real arguments, but I’m not fool enough to believe that’s got a high likelihood of occurring.
This post is going to resonate with all of the comments already.
-”Fellow citizens, I’ve called this press conference, my fourth this week”
In other words, Obama would give this press conference on a Tuesday.
-”One of the main reasons this country’s as fucked as it is right now is that for years our government has spoken to the population like children.”
This is exactly right and where this got out of control was the 2000 election that Bill Maher commented, “To be interested in anything in this election you either have to be age 6 or 66.” because all of the talk was about education and Social Security/Medicare. Add to that a boring and wonkish candidate that never found his footing going against a guy who countered that by wayyyyy overemphasizing just how regular a guy from Texas can be wearing those stupid-ass Brawny Man shirts.
It’s only been exacerbated in subsequent elections since that “regular guy” won twice. Even in 2004 Michael Savage played a clip of a John Kerry ad in mid-2004 meant to introduce him to the public and when the ad said, “he played in a band and was a hockey player” Savage interrupted:
“What is this? Why do we have candidates that try to show how much they’re like us – every dumb person you’ve met in your life? Why doesn’t a guy like this just say, ‘I’m smarter than you, I’m richer than you, I’m more successful than you, now I’m telling you I’m going to be your leader. Vote for me.’” #Paraphrase, of course#
And then 2008 you had a lot of young people and first-time voters combined with a media that was on its third national election cycle for America’s Senior Class President that needed to be asked questions about providing better cafeteria food, healthcare, and more class field trips, dude!
It seemed the decision really ended up being “do you wanna fuck Barack Obama or Sarah Palin?”
In that sense, maybe pretext was removed this time around. The 2008 national discourse? That was just like the conversation in a bar serving as the pretext for fucking the hot young candidate of your choice.
PL: I’ll try to address what I can in order:
1. Our Democracy has somehow turned into a cult of belief that everyone’s individual view is as credible or well-founded, or at least deserves to be heard as much as everyone else’s. You need look no further than the Internet to see that actually, roughly .005% of people deserve a public speaking forum. If that makes me a royalist, I’m happy to wear the tar and feathers. Most people who want to be, or foist their voices upon us, ought not be heard.
2. Candidates try to relate to us because the concept of a “leader” has been lost. Again, the voter thinks he knows more than anybody else, so he wants himself mirrored in what he elects. Obama doesn’t fit that mold, though. His was a reactionary election. Yes, Obama’s charismatic as hell, but he was elected in large part, if not entirely, as a rejection of GOP policies. There’s a good chance he wouldn’t be President today if we hadn’t had the economic meltdown we did in September, which killed McCain.
3. I don’t think anyone wanted to fuck Palin save a pile of deluded knee-jerk traditionalists. I don’t agree with the way the woman was villified for her background. But it’s clear that however much she was qualified to run Alaska, she’s deeply unqualified to lead this nation. And if I’m going to criticize her critics for cheap shots, I also have to criticize her supporters and handlers. They played a divisive card – trying to create a battle between a mythical “real” America and a godless, abortion-crazed, effete “liberal” America. And for that, for being so utterly tone deaf to the public sentiment against wedge politics at the time, they deserved to lose.
The problem is Palin now gets to play kingmaker, or at least wield considerable influence, in deciding who gets the next nomination. And her constituency is the last group on earth that should have any sway in the party right now. The GOP needs to listen to the Gingriches and grab the moderate, “Rockefeller” or “RINO” Republicans before the baby boomers start deciding, “Hey, this Obama dude isn’t bad. I get all sorts of protections and benefits in retirement with him…. I should start voting Democrat again.” Palin’s ultimately a cancer on the party, John McCain’s unforgivable sin.
not to get all pedantic (which means i’m about to get all pedantic), i think you mean “heroin” instead of “heroine”, unless you’re talking about people using brave women to get high, which does have its merits sometimes.
otherwise, yet another great entry.
PL: Haha. Perfect. And here I am bitching about how some folks shouldn’t be given a pedestal. Basic facility with language ought to be a prerequisite for anyone to offer his views.
I haven’t gotten through the entirety of your post yet (and I will, trust me), but as someone well-versed in the DrugWar rhetoric, I disagree wholeheartedly with the idea that most people would grow it. People in the comments are comparing it to alcohol, but I don’t think that’s the right comparison. How many people do you know who grow tomatoes? Grow anything for that matter? How many of those people grow those things well? I’m going to bet very few, and I’m sure most consumers of tomatoes buy them at the store rather than grow them.
Growing a plant as that requires as much attention and understanding as marijuana is more comparable to growing other food sources. To grow a decent, high-end strain can be a pain in the ass, and I believe that a vast majority of the people who are going to be smoking weed are going to be buying it from coffee shops. If you look at the Netherlands, there are plenty of coffee shops doing very well for themselves and generating large amount of money for their government. If the US legalized and sold licenses for home-grows, the tax revenues could be pretty staggering.
All that being said, I would be hard-pressed to believe that legalizing and taxing in California would generated $25 BILLION in revenue (as that’s their current budget deficit), but I do think tax revenue could be substantial, and even more so if the federal government decided to legalize and regulate the plant.
PL: Good points. But as to home growing, all you need is a couple guys with green thumbs and access to good seeds, space for a garden or a grow room and the intelligence to understand that however cheap it is to buy a unit of the stuff from the state, an upfront investment and some sweat will save them tenfold over over time and the whole neighborhood’s got a source.
Tomatoes aren’t a good analogy. Nor is any vegetable or fruit, In my opinion. I’d never bother with that. But if you gave a me a surefire way to cook Bombay Sapphire gin in a basement still made of easily accessible parts, I’d invest a day.
I don’t think the home grow license would sell very well. The barrier to entry here isn’t very high, and the chance of getting caught and fined will undoubtedly be low, as law enforcement would rather do 3846463 other things than audit people’s gardens and basements for the odd two or three personal use plants.
I agree there could be substantial tax revenue simply because of the size of the marketplace, and the initial flood of money would be large, as people would run out and buy from the state in droves for simple convenience. But once the better seeds became easy to locate, the curve on those revenues would start trending south, and keep moving in that angle. We’d effectively do little more than turn a black market grey. That’s not a bad scenario, of course. The state would get a piece of the action and drug crime would decrease. But I don’t think anything approaching the glorious revenue explosion people are predicting would ever be realized.
Please do a follow up! Help me/us dispel years of misinformation and programming, which in my case are both from a religious bent that I am now starting to break free from:
1.True/False: Smoking pot and drinking at the same time will cause *something* to happen. (bad case of the spins? Euphoria? Extreme Sickness?)
-How much does it take? If joe sixpack comes home from work, drinks his after-dinner can of domestic and smokes a joint, will he be no good for the rest of the day as opposed to being fine after just his usual can?
2.True/False: Smoking pot at a younger age (lets use the oft quoted rage of 12-17 from the anti cigarette people) causes developmental issues.
-Is how it affects you genetic? Is there a factor that will determine whether you just stay “recreational” or become a full on “pothead”?
*These questions hit closer to home for me and are closer to the reasons why I never tried. Everyone I know around me that started smoking it when I was this age really started losing all ambition at the least started acting like real dumbasses at most.
This is one of the reasons why I take the “these famous/successful people smoked and they’re ok” argument with a mound of salt. When someone raises that question I want to scream: “were they smoking BEFORE they became successful, or after they decided to put the joint down?” I’m thinking that most of the people often quoted had to stop, if only of a week, before they could do any meaningful work.*
3.True/False You have no way of knowing what’s actually “on” the pot you buy and all you have is the word of your “dealer”. Could be just pot, it could be pot sprayed with embalming fluid or something else in some attempt to up its potency, could be pot mixed in with inactive hemp to trick you?
Sorry for the long post. You’re doing a good thing. Thanks for the advice.
PL: Uh… Okay, I think:
1. Drink too much alone and you’ll get the spins. But yes, baking and drinking will give you the spins. So will running around in circles. I don’t know Joe Sixpack, and the rest of the question’s subjective, so I’d say, “Your mileage may vary.”
2. Smoking anything when you’re young or old is not a good idea. Young kids shouldn’t smoke. Period. I’m writing for adults here, not the hysterics who drag every issue into a discussion about its impact on children as a debate tactic. As to whether dope makes people apathetic, yes, that happens a lot. But that’s often a chicken before the egg explanation. Lazy people like lazy highs. Show me man who claims marijuana sapped him of all his drive and I’ll show you a guy high on what therapists call “deflection.”
3. False. Again, sensible adults such as those this is directed toward do not buy anything from a street peddler, be it a fake Rolex, concert tickets or dope. If you’re dumb enough to be buying anything from a person who’d sell a product laced with embalming fluid, you fall into the “Darwinian jurisdiction” I referenced above.
Maybe this is why the Apple commercials are so effective. Appeals to the “children” that is the American population.
PL: Put babies in a commercial and you can sell anything. Put fear of hurting babies in an argument and you can trip all sorts of emotional triggers that’ll overcome the lowest common denominator’s rational circuits.
To follow up:
First, I don’t think the state will ever sell it. They don’t sell alcohol, and given our tendency towards the free-market, I doubt it would sell weed either, and that completely changes the outcome.
So for your first point, yeah, but that’s a business. That makes revenues, and those revenues get taxed. Right now, that’s basically what’s happening, except it’s all underground. If those underground sellers open up a store front (or coffee shop), they become a legit biz, subject to the same controls and regulations as other businesses. I’ve heard it argued that most of this won’t go above board, but I just don’t believe that. If those people go above board, and their income gets taxed (and the state could even throw an additional tax on top of the weed itself, a la cigarettes), there could be substantial tax revenues.
PL: The state’s sells alcohol here in Pennsylvania.
There will be substantial tax revenue, but I think it will be a lot bigger up front and will dwindle over time. I also think it won’t be anywhere near what people are predicting.
I think the real reason why most Americans wouldn’t grow their own pot is because the time to harvest is too long for their short attention spans. While much of the process of a grow room can be automated, it still requires a good amount of dedication over time, and that would most likely prevent too many people from doing it in the long-run. In the short-run, it seems easy enough, but enough people will have failed home-grow experiments to spread the word around that it’s not easy.
And for those people who might be able to pull it off, I think you’re overestimating the number of people who understand the concept of total cost of ownership (or long-term total cost). Large upfront investments have never been popular with the majority of Americans because society emphasizes now too much. It’s always the cheap but short lasting things that seem to make a lot of money.
PL: I’m cynical about the general public, but not that cynical.
I often wish I could drop pretexts. Just say something, good or bad, instead of talking tangentially or euphemistically. So sometimes I do. And then I’m reminded why I told myself not to do that again, and grab another drink. People get too uncomfortable or even offended to listen. They see you as rude or fanatical. Regardless of how much they trusted and respected you 5 minutes ago, they mentally put you in some category whose views can be ignored for one of several reasons they deam perfectly fair.
You persuade someone by showing them that you have a similar perspective to theirs and that if you’re like them, and you support your idea/plan/view, then they should too. Presenting your view in a logical and upfront way to these people comes off as arrogant and dismissive of their sacred opinions and biases. And it usually fails.
PL:Said right, said politely, one can put his points across quite directly. And I don’t think people’s sensitivities deserve consideration, frankly. If you can’t handle polite disagreement with your views, you are developmentally challenged.
All that said, when I want something from somebody in business, if I have to, I’ll do the “Zelig” as fast as anyone. Problem is, I can only do it in a sales environment. Get in, get what you need, get out. In a protracted work environment, the mask inevitably begins to slip for me.
I’d love to fuck the shit out of Palin and then punch her in the face.
Seriously though, great, great post. A personal favorite. If alcohol is legal, so should be weed. Too many productive and successful people partake. There’s much more productive ways for law enforcement to spend their time. Love your site, read it everyday.
PL: That’s the dirty secret nobody talks about. Among a shitload of successful people, it’s the default high. Booze is wonderful, but booze taxes the body too much. People can smoke dope the night before and function just fine, and it relieves stress in a way alcohol will never be able to.
Just to echo what some other people have said, I think you say yourself why home-growers would be in a small minority if pot were legal:
> PL: Good points. But as to home growing, all you need is a couple guys with green thumbs and access to good seeds, space for a garden or a grow room and the intelligence to understand that however cheap it is to buy a unit of the stuff from the state, an upfront investment and some sweat will save them tenfold over over time and the whole neighborhood’s got a source.
Those things together are rare. According to Wikipedia, 28% of Americans live in large cities (population of over 100,000) and may very well not have access to a garden which would require indoor growing (closet, heat lamps, pots, soil, watering, the works). Between the convenience and superior quality of buying weed and the hassle, time and (albeit small) cash investment of growing your own, I think growing would be limited to aficionados, much like beer brewing.
PL: You can run a grow room in a condo. But generally, yes, the stores would make a lot of $$$ in the cities. Inevitably, however, “craft” production would begin to flood the market. Remember the old tape trading market for bootlegs Deadheads used before cds? Say what you will about hippies and stoners being apathetic, they understand how to set up a fast barter market. And I think the afficianado market in weed would be quite expansive. And I only offer that as an add-on example to the others I cited above showing why I think the homegrown market would deeply cut into projected tax revenues.
Damnit, now I have that Neil tune, “Homegrown” in my head. Not bad, but not his best.
I get the feeling there are going to be a lot of posts disagreeing with the hypothesis that people would grow their own weed. This is one of those posts, but my reasoning is a little different than the others: the fact that pot is illegal doesn’t stop anyone who wants to smoke from smoking. Why would it stop them from growing? Well, it doesn’t. Most pot smokers have tried to grow a plant if only for laughs at some point or another. I tried it, and it turned out to be too much of a hassle. Lots of expenses I hadn’t considered too, especially the special bulb and light fixture. Most people give up on it and keep buying. I don’t see any reason to think that if pot became legal, suddenly the whole pot culture would change. Smokers would smoke, buyers would buy, growers would grow (personal growers, not commercial) in the same proportions. The only differences would be where/who people bought it from and where they might smoke it and that it would be legal.
Besides that, let me say I agree with everything else you say. But the growing thing is speculative and I think there’s ample existing data that would strongly suggest that people generally can’t be bothered to grow their own.
Made-up similar example, it makes sense in abstract to say something like “there’s much less risk in growing pot and smoking it at home (providing you don’t gab about it) than there is buying it because you can’t get caught in a bust. If you keep it at home and keep it quiet, there’s virtually zero chance of ever getting into trouble which is a much bigger incentive than convenience. Therefore it’s safe to assume that most smokers grow their own, but we don’t know because they keep quiet about it.” Except that it’s speculative and not based on what actual pot smokers actually do.
PL: That’s a great rebuttal. But I think you downplay the significance of the illegality. The illegality creates the stigma. Make it legal and people will tinker with no fear of embarrassing conversations with the neighbors, losing their job, etc. I think the number of people who would take a swing at home growing would increase five to ten fold. They’d grow crap, of course, but it’d be good enough to bake people, and that’s all most people care about.
And consider colleges. Just about every frat house in America would have a grow room. Those kids have nothing but time, and they’d perfect the art. I think no matter how you cut it, we’d see a grey market glut of weed which would undercut the expected tax revenues. That’s why the stuff’s illegal, really. There’s no easy way to control a plant. If the govt thought it could regulate the stuff and control its trade, they’d have done so long ago. And that’s telling on the issue of whether it could be regulated into a robust, predictable revenue stream.
If serious investors thought they could make serious money on government regulated marijuana, we’d have seen a push for its legalization long ago.
It’s really unfortunate that industrial hemp got dragged into this so long ago simply because of the idiotic hysteria by association that is still seen today by the stupid masses (Ex: 9/11 + brown skinned muslim foreigners = lube for another war). It may not be The miracle plant but some products made from it and imported because they are economically viable.
As far as concerns for people being laid off go, who gives a shit about the short run, especially if you’re fucking yourself in the long run. This is the exact problem with the whole bailout scheme and the faulty reasoning used by the economists advising Obama on this, except that they think that whithout the benevolent hand of the government, the recovery would would take even longer.
If people are going to cite lost jobs as opposition, then it’s not much different than advocating keeping a welfare job workforce of government crotch kickers. And considering the big ass wave of entitlements coming, some not so tough decisions will have to be made on cutting spending.
PL: Until the cost of foreign labor meets the outrageous cost of domestic labor, we are going to engage in one short term fix after another. We can’t merely allow the markets to do what they do because the creative destruction periods would be too much for our social fabric and economic safety nets to bear.
Think the last eight years were a jobless recovery? Watch the next eight. This cap and trade thing they’re trying to sneak through right now? Watch how many jobs this thing offshores.
The worst part about the anti-drug laws is that, in practice, they’re absurdly racist. The DoJ has even started blatantly fucking lying about the racial composition of prisoners incarcerated for drug use:
http://www.tremblethedevil.com/my_weblog/2009/04/even-without-lies-the-damage-is-already-done.html
Drug laws in America always have and probably always will be about social control. The very first ones following the Civil War prohibited blacks from drinking, and the ones we have now began just as the Civil Rights movement faltered.
And the results have devastated the black community:
“Although only 12% of the American population is black, over half of the two-million Americans locked up in prison are black. A black man is eight-times as likely as a white man to be locked up at some point in his life. At any one time in America, almost a third of black American males in their twenties are under some form of ‘correctional supervision’ – if not actually incarcerated, then either on probation or on parole, meaning they’ve recently passed through the American penal system.”
“Even before the current crisis, in 1995 the wealth-gap between black and white was so wide that blacks owned only 8 cents of wealth for every dollar owned by whites. Just eight-cents to the dollar.
In other terms, as of 1998 the average white household’s net worth was $100,700 higher than the black average. And that wasn’t even the peak of the gap, according the most recent data, from 2007, the gap in household net worth is now $142,600.
Take a moment to consider that gap. Your average white American family has a $140,000 leg up on the average black American family.”
…it seems somewhat inevitable that a disparity like this is going to have some adverse side-effects.
PL: I don’t know if that disparity is so much a result of drug policy. There are other issues. However, I do agree with your general point. The cocaine/crack disparity in federal drug laws was abominable, and the Rockefeller Drug Laws are disturbing and disgraceful.
The odd thing to consider about marijuana legalization, however, is that it might increase violence in urban communities. A good amount of money would be sucked out of those areas and redistributed into the regulated trade.
True it’s hard to say how much of the disparity is due to the policy itself or how the average cop carries the law out – but if the policy didn’t exist, that’d nip the problem in the bud. About half of all drug arrests are for simple marijuana possession.
Blacks make up 14% of all illicit drug users, and yet over half of those in prison for illicit drug use. The law is racist in effect. And the DoJ is already cooking its own books to try and make it seem like the problem is improving faster than it is.
And I have a hard time imagining that legalizing marijuana would be detrimental to the economic well-being of the black community, because the same year the Rockefeller drug laws were passed, 1973, is the year when the divide between black and white wealth begins to increase by almost every measure.
If you’re interested the specifics will be up on the book’s thread on the Writing Forum – but it seems tough to argue that legalizing marijuana would be bad for black economics when the year the toughest anti-weed laws were passed is the same year the gap between black and white wealth begins to gape wide open.
PL: I think that if it were legalized, the urban community – not necessarily just the black community – would face a decrease in spending by individuals currently making a high margin in the illegal trade of the drug. Granted, dope isn’t the cash cow of an urban drug dealer, but I think the communities can ill afford any loss of revenue, and legalization would effect a loss of revenue. And with a decrease in profits, you might also see a push toward more sales of coke and heroin at decreased prices, to create broader markets in those to offset the losses from pot legalization. Converting dope smokers to hardened junkies or coke fiends would be a substantial negative, I think.
This idea is laced with weed. I’ve got a legal pad next to my bed with a similar idea… the next page is a description of a ginormous rubber band flung spaceship. Are you one Half Baked would dub a “creative” smoker?
PL: I’m generally creative, or at least “thinking a lot” in every state, so I guess yes.
Pot would be a great start, and I’m all for complete legalization. However, I’m one of those wild-eyed loonies who supports the legalization of all drugs. It’s amazing how many people who support pot legalization fall back on variations of “it’s for the children” or “those other drugs are different” when it comes to the rest.
PL: I don’t agree with legalization of heroin or cocaine. Not because of the children. Because the heroin junkies would overdose too much and clog the hospitals with emergencies on one hand, while the cokeheads would irritate the living shit out of the rest of the world. Imagine coming in to work on Monday and having a fidgeting idiot jump into the chair in front of your desk and run off about his weekend in a breathless fashion for ten straight minutes, or your boss come into your office in a “coming down” mood and start screaming about fuck-ups in a project you weren’t even involved with. No. No coke or heroin legalization. The world’s aggravating enough.
Well said. I’ve gotten high once off of pot after a friend of mine called me out for saying that I wasn’t a big fan of the drug simply because I had never properly felt its effects. You’re right about the stupidity of the “gateway drug” argument, it’s ridiculous. If someone is going to argue that, then they also have to argue that alcohol is just as much a gateway drug as pot is. Of course no one does this because alcohol is legal and doesn’t have the social stigma that pot does, even though it’s a more addictive and debilitating drug. Personally I would rather be drunk than high, but that’s just my preference.
As for the people here talking about how brewing is hard, they have obviously never done it themselves. Homebrewing is pretty damn easy and I can make a good clone of Old Rasputin without too much effort. A good reason that homebrewing is legal and distilling isn’t is that at most bad beer will just taste bad and make you want to pour it out. Distilling on the other hand is the type of thing that can really fuck someone up if they drink bad moonshine.
Also, Basil Hayden’s is a damn good bourbon.
Also also, for my birthday party last night I opened up a bottle of Woodford Reserve Master’s Collection. You have to try that stuff, it’s fucking awesome.
Cheers,
Geoff
PL: Thank you. That’s a hard bourbon to find, like Maker’s Mark Gold Label. Agreed on Basil Hayden’s. Nice light, summery bourbon. And Old Rasputin’s the shit. I love that stuff.
Never really been a huge fan of Joe Rogan but he wrote a letter to Kellogg’s (actually blogged) after Phelps got photographed smoking pot…you may have even read it but if not check it out its humorous and correlates with your post:
http://blog.joerogan.net/archives/454
Oh and your book was great, keep them coming.
PL: Thank you, and thanks for that link. Rogan’s admonition of Kellogg’s for biting the hand that feeds them so much profit from Pop Tarts and Frosted Flakes is great.
I wish I could get as cynical as you are about the future of the American economy, but something keeps bugging me. Isn’t the worst case scenario for US economic policy a transformation into France or Germany? They have stronger unions, stronger worker’s rights, more protectionism, and a populace that is generally supportive of the above. If that is the case I can see how it would be depressing to see the end of positive economic growth in the United States, but I don’t see how it’s the end of the world.
As far as outsourcing goes, more and more jobs are going to be given to China and India because nobody cares about the trade deficit. Eventually all of the people who lost their jobs are going to form a political party that aims to put in protectionist measures, while everyone who’s rolling in money as a result of globalization is going to create an opposing party that tries to keep things the way they are. Because globalization will just lead to more job losses the protectionist party would grow until it took control. Then we would become France. It will eventually destroy us as wealth gets sapped out of the US through the economic cycle, but how long would that take? Decades? Centuries? Old Europe seems to be undergoing ossification process at a very slow pace, with demographics presenting more of a threat to their societies than their socialist policies.
My question is, do you believe that the future involves a US government that hasn’t been taken over by protectionists and socialists determined to protect American jobs at all costs, and if you do, what’s wrong with feeding off of our stored wealth until China and India become bloated, geriatric societies that choose to put economic growth second?
PL: Yes. Culturally we’re different than old Europe. We’re too married to risk, thank God, and too competitive internally to embrace the calcification process you describe (not a misprint, they’re calcifying). Secondarily, we can’t afford it. We’re a lot bigger than they are. Thirdly, I think American politicians, to their rare credit, realize that protectionism is a dead end. If we take that approach, it works against your goal by slowing China’s and India’s growth, and the attendant rise in their workers’ wages. Bush was wrong about much, but he once said globalization was fate, and we’d might as well get the process of taking our lumps over with right now. In that conclusion, he was all but infallible.
We are heading into greater wealth disparity and less job security for the long term. We have a standard of living that is simply unsustainable in this country without massive amounts of credit flowing through the system predicated on fantastic, constantly upward-moving asset valuations. There are already two classes in this country. People who live off the markets and people who get used by them. Expect more of it, and more difference between the way both camps live. And no, the weaker of the two will never get a socialist agenda enshrined into government because the monied class controls K Street. Watch this Universal Health Care thing. The insurers are already castrating the proposal via the lobbyists. Same’s about to happen with Cap & Trade in the Senate.
Since a large part of the barriers to legalization is the government not being able to properly regulate and make money off it, why won’t they just take what they can get from the people who will inevitably produce it on a mass scale? If you wanted to become the Budweiser of weed, it would have to require government regulation of some sort. There’s more people who’d rather run to the store to grab some white widow than grow it in their closet. Give the growers in compliance tax incentives, like the ability to write off the equipment (laugh out loud). The “all or nothing” approach leaves billions on the table. I think the convenience factor would ultimately prevail since it’s a bitch waiting 2-4 months for your plants to veg and flower.
PL: Yeah, the govt would undoubtedly make some cash on it, but not as much as people think it would. And the other question is, would it make enough to offset the losses in tax revenue coming from people who’s livelihoods depended on its prohibition.
Another fine post. I agree with your twittered (i can’t bring myself to refer to them as ‘tweets’ yet) that it’s the counterculture mascots who actually do more damage to the cause.
I also think alot of people missed the point of this…in that you argue that legalization FOR THE SAKE OF TAX REVENUE is not a cogent argument.
While I agree that the tax revenues generated from state-side “controlled substance sale” would be less then the conservative estimates generated by reputable groups…and SUBSTANTIALLY less then the hop heads quote, I believe you can’t dismiss the larger economic impact of legalization.
~The initial market boom for people buying supplies (miracle grow would post higher profits than Exxon mobile)
~Property sales of people looking to invest in farm scale production as well as associated equipment sales
~reduction of farming subsidy
~reduction in prison operating costs
~reduction in policing costs
I realize there is a trade off. We’d need less cops, less prison guards, less (dare i say it) lawyers?!?!?
but that argument didn’t hold water during the prohibition debate either. I wouldn’t know where to begin to get you the figures but what kind of economic impact does Budweiser and Coors provide America? Maybe the tax revenue they generate is insignificant but I wonder how many taxpaying Americans they employ? Marlboro has done legalization logistics since the 60′s to get a jump on brand control if and when it happens.
Because alcohol is harder to make? I disagree, I could pick any fruit I want, lock in in a barrel for 2 years and it’d get me drunk. I could go get drunk off mouth wash. That’s the same argument you replied above. I can produce crap and it’d get me buzzed. I think legalization would create competition which creates a quality market… a connoisseurs market. Water grown plants from cross pollinated seeds would not only create brand names and full time growing jobs, but a science and education field to drive it.
I agree with your central argument. That the tax revenue generated from legalization would not dig us out of this hole. I just disagree with what you used to support that. I think your argument you used in reply to ‘tb at 12:17pm’ was better: Yeah we’d see a quick windfall but it wouldn’t be that much and it wouldn’t be sustaining.
But i think at this point…anything that may either make people happy or some money should be seriously looked at.
PL: I agree with your conclusion that anything is better than nothing, and a damaging nothing that ruins people’s lives for no good reason. I just think it’d be nice if we reached the bigger argument about the merits of the general policy. It’d be kind of refreshing to see people argue these sorts of things with cold, hard, dispassionate analysis, rather than all the myths.
Excellent post there PL. Wasn’t quite expecting a post on marijuana reform when I loaded the site…but was pleased with your analysis of it all nonetheless.
I will say that I think that for medicinal purposes it should be legalized. After all, our own government grows and supplies a small handfull of people with “legal weed” for a variety of conditions…and that it’s hyprocritical for them to declare that there’s “no medicinal value” as their reasoning for it to still be classified as Schedule 1.
As for full legalization…yeah, I’d love to see that as I don’t believe that it’s either a hinderance to ones productivity or a gateway to other harsher drugs. But yet I don’t believe that it’ll ever happen in my lifetime.
I’m 34 and have enjoyed smoking since 1994. Since that time I’ve been: 1) continually employed professionally 2) obtained 2 B.A.’s from two different universities 3) bought and maintained a home and been an upstanding member of my community 4) ran for Mayor of my hometown(lost…but got 30% of the vote so I’m content with that) and 5) managed to do all this and more while continuing to enjoy smoking a plant placed on Earth by Mother Nature herself.
Keep up the great work PL!
PL: Thanks. As to what you’ve done, damn. Running for office and grabbing 30% of the vote. That’s impressive. Considering your views, I can imagine that involved a heroic amount of restraint in keeping yourself from saying what you wanted to.
Quoted by PL “I think that if it were legalized, the urban community – not necessarily just the black community – would face a decrease in spending by individuals currently making a high margin in the illegal trade of the drug. Granted, dope isn’t the cash cow of an urban drug dealer, but I think the communities can ill afford any loss of revenue, and legalization would effect a loss of revenue. And with a decrease in profits, you might also see a push toward more sales of coke and heroin at decreased prices, to create broader markets in those to offset the losses from pot legalization. Converting dope smokers to hardened junkies or coke fiends would be a substantial negative, I think.”
____________
“Freakonomics” uses the primary source information form the fantastic book “Gang Leader for a Day” (about an Indian grad student who befriends an urban gang leader) to argue pretty convincingly that drug-dealing self-assembles into the same corporate hierarchy as McDonalds:
Guys at the top get rich, but most of the minion burger-flipper or pot-dealers don’t make much at all. And the revenue works it’s way up to the top of the pyramid and then LEAVES the ghetto in the form of bling, guns, or cars – it’s not reinvested to enrich the community (the guys at the top don’t buy their goodies from within the hood). Drugs don’t add revenue to urban neighborhoods, they siphon it out. Granted, the drug trade is incredibly interwoven into the urban community so legalizing pot would require local governments to provide other revenue streams.
Although legalization would be a loss of revenue – it would also immediately erase half of all black drug arrests. And in the long term, the aggregate effect of those arrests (fatherless families) are much more troublesome than simple lost income.
I think it’s reaching a bit to theorize that with weed legal, other harder drugs would suddenly proliferate across the urban populations more. To some extent maybe, but I think the dope smokers would just continue happily smoking their dope – if anything the precedents indicate that legal weed would decrease the proliferation of harder drugs like coke and meth, why risk prison time if you can just get high on weed?
If anything weed would act as a buffer against harder drugs, especially considering Portugal’s decriminalization of small amounts of many drugs actually DECREASED their overall drug problem:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html
Legalizing weed might cause a small immediate decrease in income, but the overall effect on urban communities would be a strongly positive one. Blacks make up 14% of all illicit drug users, and are half of those behind bars before it. And half of all drug arrests are simple marijuana possession.
Removing them from the system would at least be a start. Shit ain’t right:
“…A black man is eight-times as likely as a white man to be locked up at some point in his life. At any one time in America, almost a third of black American males in their twenties are under some form of “correctional supervision” – if not actually incarcerated, then either on probation or on parole, meaning they’ve recently passed through the American penal system.
This means that as of 1996, a sixteen-year-old kid in America would have nearly a one-in-three chance of spending some time behind bars if he was unlucky enough to have been born black. If he happened to be born white, he’d only face a 4% chance of incarceration – a disparity that’s been steadily increasing since then. In Chicago’s home state there’re 10,000 more black prisoners than black college students, and for every two black students enrolled in college there are five elsewhere in the state either locked up or on parole.
In 2001 a government survey revealed that the per-capita rate of illicit drug use was only point-two of a percent higher for blacks, and yet three-quarters of those arrested for drug possession were black.”
from: http://www.tremblethedevil.com/my_weblog/vilest-deeds-like-poison-weeds.html
(And believe it or not, I’ve never done any drug other than alcohol. Stupid government work.)
PL: That’s a lot of info, and I’ve read Freakonomics and some articles excerpting the undercover study you reference.
I agree the benefit of less imprisonment outweighs any loss in revenue. If I suggested it didn’t, I misspoke. But I don’t think I did.
I don’t agree that decriminalization would cause a rush to pot by people otherwise looking for harder shit. There’d also be a push by dealers to sell the hard stuff to more buyers, and it would increase their use, I think. Dope dealers would also have to develop new product lines. They’re not just going to go legit and open coffee shops.
I’m not sure Portugal is a great analogy for the same reasons suggestions we follow Sweden’s economic approach ring a bit hollow. Different population, different culture, different size country.
I guess ultimately we agree to disagree. A couple of a comments have taken issue with the idea that there wouldn’t be significant tax revenue from legalizing weed. I don’t remember if I stated this earlier, but I think if you look at the Netherlands, while they aren’t completely legalized, I think you still see a large majority of people just buying it.
Also, as an aside, BIG kudos to you for responding to every single comment. Not a lot of bloggers do so (although not a lot of bloggers get the kind of intelligent responses you do either, so kudos to you on that too).
PL: Well it is pretty much de facto legal here. Among people who know the channels, its trade is open and takes place right alongside all the other legitimate forms of commerce. It’s a slap on the wrist McCrime for most people. If you live in a decent area, the cops don’t even look for it. If you live in a bad area, they ignore it.
I only have one problem with your argument: If pot is so easy to make and so much harder to catch, why is marijuana so profitable now? You could make the argument that it’s a felony (at least it is in my state), and people don’t wanna get caught, but it seems that keeping growing illegal while legalizing selling would create the same incentive for buying on the open market that exists now.
PL: I hear your point, but I simply don’t see any way that legalizing it wouldn’t create a craft brewing culture that would offset a tremendous amount of the revenue bump expected. But as many have noted, I could be wrong.
Outstanding post, your logical approach is however long overdue in this country. Sidenote- im posting as Future Phila Lawyer not because I admire and want to follow in your footsteps, but am a soon to be law student from Philadelphia and meant that name as neither a comparison to you personally nor as an underlying dedication to praising the deriliction of the legal field.
Addressing your wedge issue of the technical loss in tax revenue on government produced/or retail sold product due to the benefit of home growth as a deterrent to legalization I have to throw in my two cents. You are, I think, looking at the issue a bit one dimensionally in this regard.
Hypothetically, the government can profit from a market of home grown marijuana just as it could by either contacting product growth to private companies – permits issued to marijuana growers who could then create economies of scale on cheap but not necessarily less potent marijuana that would crowd out any local pizza delivery guy growing in his basement. This would raise absolutely no immediate issue of low grade product because these companies would be able to compensate those who did have the formulae for the best weed enough that sticking to ones principled freelance growing would look idiotic and certainly unprofitable. Home Growers lack the physical capital to market, advertise, and reach markets outside their locale and Marijuanna Inc. not only employs a business model that allows widespread geographic scale but as a result of its market share can afford to pay high enough salaries to capture the best/ most knowledgeable of home growers. Corporatization was a perfectly logical development in this country and happened for many good reasons, there is no reason to suggest it would not happen in a billion dollar market like marijuana.
Secondly, and perhaps in concert with the aforementioned, states/and or the Federal Gov’t should consider supplementary markets to marijuana itself to increase its tax revenue as a result of legalization. Markets including but not limited to actually 1) Manufacturing smoking devices like pipes,bongs,bubblers inter alia – again creating economies or scale or having the ability to undercut competition selling similar products. Thus, if you aren’t smoking Big Brother weed, you are more than likely hitting a Government bong or rolling Obama joint paper. These complimentary products are a key niche the government could capture in order to hedge home growth, and privatization/ conglomerate marijuana retailers would be represent endless investment opportunity and incentivized production with which government takes a cut.
If the Bulbs, Soil, and other ancillary growing products are actually made and sold by Gov’t retailers then private vendors must purchase permits to do so. This is a bit more farfetched than I’d immediately thought possible but enforcement would be akin to having a liquor license, in other words pretty noticeable and punishable if you don’t have municipal/state permission.
I’m likely babbling on about fantastical ideas that could never happen but I suppose my apathetic stoner mind no longer is capable of possessing the ambition of entrepreneurial spirit nor the brain cells to purpose a perfectly coherent economic model for a proposal that seems so blatantly obvious. I’d be interested to hear where I’ve gone wrong, and I do sincerely digress with an open ear to criticism.
PL: I don’t think you’ll find much political will to support or profit from the creation or sale of paraphenalia. And again, there’s no way to stop a glassblower in Utica from taking over the pipe market. If it’s hard to regulate plants, it’s even harder to regulate the manufacture of appliances. The only difference is one requires more technical production capability than the other.
Permits are one thing the govt would undoubtedly look to sell. And yes, there would be a load of private mid-sized growers who would pay for them and give Uncle Sam his cut. But no matter how you slice it, there would be tens to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people who would grow at home and supply friends. How big would that culture/market be? Big, I think – big enough to eat into a lot of the expected tax revenue.
“I don’t agree with legalization of heroin or cocaine. Not because of the children. Because the heroin junkies would overdose too much and clog the hospitals with emergencies on one hand, while the cokeheads would irritate the living shit out of the rest of the world. Imagine coming in to work on Monday and having a fidgeting idiot jump into the chair in front of your desk and run off about his weekend in a breathless fashion for ten straight minutes, or your boss come into your office in a “coming down” mood and start screaming about fuck-ups in a project you weren’t even involved with. No. No coke or heroin legalization. The world’s aggravating enough.”
This is the exact logic used by a lot of people who want to keep weed illegal. If anything, heroin legalization would decrease the number of overdoses, which are mostly caused by the inconsistent purity of street heroin. I understand that we would have to legalize weed first, and then move to coke and heroin later, but that still needs to be where we end up. Cocaine and heroin are a lot more harmful than weed or alcohol, but their prohibitions fail for the same reasons. Their prohibitions probably have worse externalities, such as guerrilla warriors controlling economies of Mexico, Columbia and Peru, gangs controlling economies of American inner cities, and an imprisonment rate in America comparable to third world counties. It’s also possible that legalizing these drugs would not increase use. Portugal decriminalized all drugs and saw a decrease in use due to a greater emphasis on treatment. I think a lot of drug war supporters are so desperate to hold the line because they see legalization ultimately leading to a situation where corporations make tens of billions of dollars off of heroin and meth. This will admittedly be pretty hard to stomach, but it will beat the hell out of the status quo.
PL: I don’t know too many folks who’ve done heroin, but those I’ve met don’t even support its legalization. Doesn’t matter how adulterated the street stuff is, overdoses will still be rampant with legal stuff because inevitably users use more and more and more and eventually you use too much and it’s game over. People overdoes everyday on prescription drugs that are made by regulated companies in laboratory settings.
As to coke, ever worked with a coke head? It’s funny for a while, then you want to kill yourself. The moods, the mania. I’m half joking about keeping it criminalized because frankly, I don’t care, but it’s legalization would irritate the fuck out of a lot of people. We’re torn and frayed enough in this country. The last thing we need is a million legally wired idiots running around office suites jabbering like jackasses and running out to score at lunch. Because you know that’s where it would go – sick, twisted fucks using the drug so they could stay up later pumping out more billable hours.
“I agree the benefit of less imprisonment outweighs any loss in revenue. If I suggested it didn’t, I misspoke. But I don’t think I did.
I don’t agree that decriminalization would cause a rush to pot by people otherwise looking for harder shit. There’d also be a push by dealers to sell the hard stuff to more buyers, and it would increase their use, I think. Dope dealers would also have to develop new product lines. They’re not just going to go legit and open coffee shops.
I’m not sure Portugal is a great analogy for the same reasons suggestions we follow Sweden’s economic approach ring a bit hollow. Different population, different culture, different size country.”
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Didn’t mean to sound like you’d come down one way or the other about the benefits of less prisoners vs. decreased revenue, you didn’t seem to come down one way or the other – was only trying to assert that I think the decreased prison population would far outweigh any immediate decrease in income for the dealers.
Yeah the Portugal example is far from perfectly analogous, I suppose statistics of drug use increasing or decreasing during the American Prohibition would be a lot more telling. Been able to find some support for that.
If you follow this link and search for “iron law,” it sounds like prohibition makes harder drugs spread – so it would follow that legalization would actually decrease the spread and usage of harder drugs:
http://www.cedro-uva.org/lib/levine.alcohol.html
(quoting)
- “It has frequently been observed that drug prohibition tends to drive out the weaker and milder forms of drugs, and to increase the availability and use of stronger and more dangerous drugs (see, e.g., Brecher, 1972). This has been so often reported that many analysts speak of it as an “iron law” of drug prohibition. This “law” holds because milder drugs are usually bulkier, harder to hide and smuggle, and less remunerative.
“From 1890 to 1915, beer accounted for more of the total alcohol consumed than did hard liquor. In 1915, for example, beer drinking accounted for nearly twice the total alcohol consumed as spirits did. Warburton compared alcohol consumption in the period of 1911 to 1914 with that during the prohibition years 1927-1930 and concluded that “the per capita consumption of beer has been reduced about 70 per cent….the per capita consumption of wine has increased about 65 per cent…[and] the per capita consumption of spirits has increased about 10 per cent” (Warburton, 1932, p. 260). This change was not permanent — after repeal, spirits consumption fell while beer consumption rose. By 1935 the alcohol consumed from beer equaled that from spirits, and by 1945 Americans were getting 50 percent more of their total alcohol from beer than from hard liquor (Levine and Reinarman, 1993, 1998; Rorabaugh,1979; Miron and Zwiebel, 1991).”
(end quoting)
Whether or not legal weed leads to more widespread use of harder drugs (meth as well at the ones you named, especially since you can just brew that shit up at home and it’s a ton more potent than more organic drugs) – the bottom line is that the broken economies of our urban areas need fixing. Harder drugs might try to push out, but at least with legal weed more fathers would be at home to keep an eye on their sons. Legalization of weed would definitely need to happen in tandem with some kind of urban economic opportunity program.
However with the economic situation what it is, the prospects of repairing urban economies seems pretty damn bleak.
PL: Well, for the reasons you cite, the urban poor are on their own, so if they get legal weed, they’ll get that and nothing else. Perhaps it will sedate the otherwise desperate and there’s a benefit in that. But again, it’s not going to plow a boatload of money into the economy.
To circle back to my initial point, the best reason for its legalization is that there’s no good reason to waste money, time and resources – and hurt people committing a victimless crime – sustaining its criminalization.
I stumbled onto this site from tuckermax.com, and I must say it is refreshing to see people debate what can be a hot button topic in a calm, rational even logical way. I had long given up on finding a site that doesn’t have the idiotic “firsties” post at the top followed by 3-5 posts on the topic, followed by 100 posts of people flaming each other back and forth. I will admit to having enjoyed some of the legal relaxant wine, and a total inabillaty to spell. I truly believe that pot should be legal, however I should not smoke it. My experience with pot consisted of three months of get up…go to work…get high…go to (insert closest fast food restaurant)…play Tiger Woods Golf…sleep. I was not exactly curing cancer. That being said I have meet many people that function just fine while high, in fact I have met several that function even better than while sober. As far as the tax revenues are concerned I, in my uneducated opinion would have to imagine that if you took the tax revenues, whatever they are and deducted the costs of enforcing marijuana laws there cannot be any way we come out in the red. I am absolutely a live and let live person and if while there will absolutely be people that allow pot to ruin their lives I think these people would do so any way legal otherwise, just as people ruin their lives with booze. I would like to apologize in advance if this post is long and/or rambling I just really enjoyed reading all of the other comments and wanted to add my two cents.
P.S. I think that it is incredible that you take the time to respond to every post personally.
Ben
PL: Thanks. And I don’t disagree on us coming out in the black on tax revenues on dope sales. My point was just a hope, admittedly naive, that we could have the debate on its plain merits. Work in law for a little while and you’ll develop a deep hatred for pretexts.
As to the quality of commentary here, that compliment goes to the readers. They’re responsible for that. I just add a few more $.02 comments in reply.
have to disagree with PL on one point. i think it’s pretty doubtful that most people would start breeding their own home-grown stashes, the main reason being the inherent slothfulness of the average American. anyone with a few ounces of sense can brew a decent cup of coffee, but Americans are still paying $4 for the same thing at Starbucks every day. they’ll eat it up if it’s packaged properly.
PL: As a Starbucks junkie, I have to offer a couple points dispelling the myth that all of us pay huge sums for coffee. First, I don’t buy lattes or complex drinks of any kind. I buy coffee, with perhaps a shot of espresso added, or Cafe Americanos (espresso with water added). The most these cost is $2.25-2.50, and that’s for a Venti, with a lot more caffiene in it than a coffee I’d get elsewhere. I also never ask for any flavor shots or any of that crap. I use the powdered vanilla stuff and sugar available at the creamer station.
When I’m having coffee at home, I make my own.
Now, as to the dope thing, your point’s been made a few times in mildly different ways. My only response remains that I’m not as cynical about Americans’ laziness as people espousing your view have been. I think Americans can be damn resourceful, even the dimmest of us, and no more so than when it comes to getting a free buzz.
Gonna beat the dead horse here by chiming in the side of those who would not grow themselves. I don’t think it’s cynical or disrespectful to Americans to understand that there really is no such thing as a free lunch. Growing things yourself takes time and energy. That translates to a monetary cost. Generally, it’s cheaper and more efficient to spend half an hour at work (at $20 an hour) and use your profits from that labor to purchase a week of recreation. Assuming a dime bag lasts a week and ignoring payroll taxes.
PL: You’re assuming most Americans are smart enough and make enough to work through the value of time at work v. value of time expended in gardening formula you offer. I wouldn’t call that cynical.
You’re also forgetting that economics aren’t the only draw to homegrowing. There’s a community element and hobby aspect to the thing.
I have to jump on with everybody else about the homegrown argument. You violated your own rule by even bringing that up, nobody can predict how many people would grow their own weed just as nobody can predict how many people would start smoking weed. By bring it up, you were asking readers to ignore your main argument and bring on an onslaught of vegetable growing statistics and microbrewing analyses.
I also don’t like the main argument here. You’re saying pro-legalization people should not tangential arguments because they do a disservice to the real argument, which is that weed is harmless. No shit, the same thing is true for every single political issue ever. The strongest legalization advocates would probably legalize everything if they could and the strongest opposers would probably ban alcohol, tobacco, and driving past 45 mph if they could.
Every legalization argument is just a proxy war between those who want government to protect us from our own stupidity and those who don’t. Laws are not made when one side convinces the other it is wrong. Laws are made when one side convinces enough voters that a new law is in line with their values, so much so that majority of politicians agree to vote for the law to gain/retain office.
Your beef here is not with legalization advocates, it’s really with the standards of political debates and ultimately with human nature.
PL: I’ll deal with you last point first. Uh… no shit? I say as much in different language in three or four different places. And if that’s not obvious, it ought to be implicit considering that’s an angle I use in everything I write?
Now, back to chronological order, as to your first point, that construction created discussion. That’s what writing does, no? If I felt like strategizing on the level you suggest, I’d do it. That’s called writing a legal brief. That’s also called boring the audience to tears. And if I found myself thinking it out that deeply, I’d probably stop, breathe and do something more constructive. Like, say… masturbate.
As to the proxy war thing, again, your own argument back at you – no shit. As to the civics lesson following it? Nifty, and again, no shit. All you’ve done is draw the picture of the process I was skewering. Is that an aborted or incomplete attempt at a rebuttal or a debate trope offered to show you’re facile with paraphrasing? I don’t know if I can give you props for either, but I applaud the effort on the whole. The points are laid out linearly and concisely, and I’m told that’s a sign of an excellent critical mind, probably one sharper than mine. So to borrow from the eminent philosopher Carl Spackler’s anecdote about the Dalai Lama granting him “total consciousness” on his deathbed, “[You've] got that going for [you].”
Great post, and thank you for doing mini updates, I now have a reason to check this site every day. One of your commenters said that if marijuana were suddenly legal, we would see spike in usage, which would eventually come down to the current level, after the ‘novelty’ wore off. I agree 100%. In the late 1990′s, the courts up here in Ontario ruled that it was OK for women to walk around in public without a top, as they concluded that forcing women to cover their breasts was unconstitutional. That summer, there were tits….EVERYWHERE. Hookers in Toronto were standing half naked on the curb. And while it was fun getting a boner at lunch hour, for the girls, the novelty of bare boobs wore off fast. A girl can still go topless up here, but they (sadly) rarely do. As would be the same with legal marijuana; sure, initally there might be a spike in smoking for the novelty, but pot use would settle down rather quickly. The arguement that if weed is legal children will start getting baked is horseshit. People who want to get stoned are going to get stoned, regardless of the law. I say a small surge in baking that inevitably tapers off is s small price to pay for sensible drug laws.
PL: I agree there’d be a bump, and a tapering to follow. As to the bare breasts thing, I find that terribly depressing. I have a dream of how that would work were the law rescinded here, and you’ve put a pin in it.
Just read the Phelps link, good stuff. It gets me thinking that it doesn’t help that people like Phelps don’t stand behind their lifestyles. Every celebrity who is caught smoking dope tries to PR their way out of it. No balls. Imagine if instead Phelps finances a marijuana education campaign. Becomes a spokesperson for pot (getting him no money) instead of for breakfast cereal (making him loads.) A little bit of integrity in public figures. In a society addicted to celebrity would it make a difference? Celebrities have gotten millions of people to invest in all sorts of charities they weren’t previously aware of. Any thoughts?
PL: I’ve thought the same thing, then I considered what I’d do if I had his endorsements. I’d move into a gated compound away from cameras, do whatever I liked behind those gates, take the money and smile for the Wheeties box. Like everybody else in this country does – be one thing in the light, another on your own time.
You’re right about my earlier comments being a big paraphrasing of your post. I was simultaneously reading this post and making the arguments you said are disingenuous over an IM conversation so I was in the analyze and attack mindset when I made my comments and that isn’t what this site is about.
Side question: I’m smoking weed out of a tobacco pipe right now, do you think that classy or tacky?
PL: Who cares what it is if you like doing it? As to what this site’s about, who knows? No need to ever explain. Write what you like and please, by all means, if you disagree with me or think I’m full of shit, say so.
I’ve been a long time fan and have your book, but this is my first posting. The reason I chose to write today is because I was just released last night from central booking in nyc for possesion of marijuana. I spent 30 hours locked in a cell under inhuman conditions for possesing maybe 10 grams of weed (less than a dime). The reason I write is to point out a fallacy that some people mentioned in earlier comments about marijauana being decriminalized. Decriminiliztion does not mean a god-damn thing. According to NY law possesion of a small amount of marijuana (28 grams or less) is not a crime, but a violation much like a speeding ticket or open container summons. However, I have never been locked up for either of these offenses. I cannot even begin to describe the level of humiliation and abuse that I was subjected to in the 30 hours that I was locked up for something that has supposedly been decriminalized. Maybe you can clear up for me what decriminalized means. If it means that one cannot realize jail time than perhaps I am wrong, because I in fact did not receive jail time. But I sure felt like a criminal being locked up and treated like the lowest of scum for over 24 hours. I never in a million years thought that I would experience something like this. I only wish I could of been high throughout the 30 hours, but unfortunately that wore off during the first hour, during which I thought : Cool I’m getting arrested, something to tell the grandkids. The funny thing is that this is perhaps the tenth time that I have smoked in my life. This experience has completely changed the way I look at our justice system. I am completely disgusted by its complete waste of time and resources. Out of the 200 people that I was locked up with, perhaps 50 percent were locked up for marijuana possesion. How can the governemnt continue to enforce a policy that clearly does not work? Every politican out there knows it doesn’t work, but is too much of a pussy to aknowledge the issue and speak out against it in public. I spoke to my cousin, who is a cop, and he told me that a marijauana arrest is discretionary. Cops only arrest people, because it helps them rack up overtime. Wouldn’t it make more sense to pay them better wages, so that they didn’t have to act like bitter pricks( I am not speaking about all officers, just those who arrested me)? I’m sorry I had to vent, but people should know that decrimilization is meaningless until marijuana is truly legalized. Please keep on writing, because I always find relief in reading your stuff.
PL: Vent away, and I’m sorry for what happened to you. Nothing to add because, well, the story speaks for itself.
Wow. This piece sparked a whole shitload of debate.
Have you thought of any other Freakonomics-esque unintended consequences legalization might have? I’d vote for anything that would make my dick bigger.
PL: Watch the class division a universal health care plan would create in this country. You want to see a form of income based segregation like we’ve never seen before? Just watch what that would do.
But then, Obama doesn’t really plan to get a plan through this term. That’s just bullshit to keep people thinking he’s fighting the good fight – keep them ready to vote for him in 2012. The Democrats in Congress know that a UHC plan is a game changer that might imperil their tenuous hold on moderate voters. They want to keep politics right where they are at the moment, with them looking like they’re fighting against the GOP for the interests of the little guy. It’s such amazing bullshit. The Dems could ram UHC through right now if they wanted to, but they’re shit scared of putting any seats at risk in 2010. They may be right to be cautious, but there’s also a chance they’re going to start looking like a party a lot less interested in change than preservation of control. And that might cost them a lot more than they think. Their base is already cynical about politics. Give these Obama voters proof that even the brightest alleged agent of change is just another shrewdy, and his party nothing but a polished form of the GOP serving the same special interests and you have a recipe for a GOP resurgence.
Always remember, in the absence of any hope Washington can ever do the right thing (and there’s very little of that remaining in the country), moderates with some cash in the bank will vote with their pocketbooks. And that’s death for the Democrats.