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The federal government has impeded and harassed the marijuana industry but clearly hasn't eliminated it
It has been two weeks since the voters in Colorado and Washington State chose to legalize marijuana, yet there still hasn’t been any solid response from the Obama administration. How the federal government will deal with the conflict between state and federal laws on marijuana remains the big unanswered question.
Given this void of solid information, one can only speculate. But it seem likely that the federal government’s behavior toward medical marijuana could serve as an example for how it will deal with the legalization of recreational marijuana.
Under federal law marijuana is still classified as a Schedule I substance, meaning that it has “no currently accepted medical use in the United States.” The federal government does not believe there is such as thing as “medical marijuana.” That is why even in the 18 states that have legalized medical marijuana the federal government still considers it illegal. What this means is that on a legal level the federal/state conflict that will be created by the new marijuana legalization initiatives is basically no different than the ongoing federal/state conflict over medical marijuana.
What we do know from our decades of experience with medical marijuana is that the federal government has neither the resources, the desire nor the ability to go after regular users. We can safely assume that in Colorado and Washington State the federal government will not be arresting adults for having or using small amounts of marijuana. The personal possession parts of both laws are secure.
When it comes to the production and retail sale of medical marijuana, however, the federal government has been cryptically inconsistent in the past few years. They have raided and tried to shut down many dispensaries. The primary target seems to be the largest dispensaries and those in states with looser regulations, but that is not always the case. Federal agencies have also made it difficult for all dispensaries to operate as businesses by doing things like cutting off the use of credit cards and access to banking.
That said, there are still thousand of dispensaries operating in multiple states. The federal government has impeded and harassed the medical marijuana industry but clearly hasn’t eliminated it.
In the short- to medium-term a very similar response to the recently approved marijuana legalization initiatives seems the most likely of several possible outcomes. The federal government will harass and delay a legal marijuana retail system, but won’t completely stop one from existing. Of course we won’t know for sure until the rubber really meets the road when the states begin implementation.
Photo by Dank Depot under Creative Commons license
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“What we know from our decades of experience with medical marijuana is that the federal government has neither the resources, desire or ability to go after regular users.” With that thought in mind, you may find this interesting.
http://www.justice.gov/usao/eousa/foia_reading_room/usam/title9/27mcrm.htm
Go to 9-27.230, Initiating and Declining Charges—Substantial Federal Interest, Part B, Comment.
We might see a shift. I don’t expect Obama’s second term to be much better on economic policy, because his economic team really believes in the neoliberal Third Way agenda. But I don’t think that they have a commitment on marijuana one way or the other. Before the election, they probably figured being tough on pot was better politically, but now, do they really care one way or the other? With enough pressure they’ll probably shift, cautiously and incrementally.
Perhaps a good step 1 would be to push to get marijuana under Schedule 2. There are good scientific grounds for this, with solid research showing that marijuana is useful as an anti-nausea treatment for chemotherapy, glaucoma, and I’m sure people can point out others. That could at least put medical marijuana on more solid ground. Step 2 would be figuring out how to move toward full legalization.
And while we’re at it, an activist DoJ could take some civil rights actions against local police forces that use bigoted stop-and-frisk policies (hello NYC).
We have a number of things to still do, even in WA and CO.
1) We need to legalize recreational use in other states. I suggest California is the next step as well as some red state with lots of libertarian attitude, like Montana or Alaska.
2) We need to lower the age from 21 to a more reasonable age, 19 or 18. I’d prefer a younger age so high schoolers aren’t doing something illegal when they use, which would be safer for them, but the first step is to extend this new legality to young adults in college or starting their full time working career.
3) We need to extend legalization to the individual who grows his or her own supply. The individual possession limit of an ounce makes that illegal.
4) We need to change the intoxication definition for driving. Since blood tests can show high levels for someone who uses regularly but isn’t high at all, the usage of blood tests needs to be jettisoned. We need instead to have other evidence of impairment while driving be the standard.
5) Eventually we need to protect individuals from employer tests as reason to not hire or to fire when there is no evidence of impairment at work from abuse. It may make sense for employers to use drug tests to screen employees from using illegal drugs even if they never are impaired on the job; but it makes no sense to do that with a legal substance. Imagine the uproar if there was a test to show if you’d had a beer or a glass of wine on a Friday night weeks later after no drinking and you lost your job for it.
Here’s the convenient backdrop that the Obama Administration has been waiting for: http://www.boston.com/news/world/united-nations/2012/11/20/official-calls-for-marijuana-ballot-rollback/QEqcQ9iGNYt6U7AWyy8BLM/story.html
Of course, it is highly likely that the Obama Administration had the clout to see that Yans got to the position he now holds in the UN, so the Obama crowd actually might have orchestrated all of this.
And people in California sure know how Obama feels Last week in September, he let Eric Holder go quite ballistic on one small neighbor hood in Santa Rosa. You had DEA, DOJ, ICE and local police bashing in doors and hauling people out to the curb for processing. Can’t have people growing their own, because well, you just can’t! The fact that a person’s assets can be seized gives agents of any agency all the motivation they would ever need.
You are missing a rather important part of the picture – the fact that Big Pharmaceuticals need for marijuana to be kept a prescription drug. We were told by our local California newspapers, not to worry, even as we watched the Feds close down one pot dispensary after another.
No need to get worried: after all, there was a pharmacy in Great Britain that would be happy to send us our marijuana providing we have a valid prescription. Talk about needlessly out sourcing our American jobs! Rural communities in California have an 18% unemployment rate – and people growing medical marijuana were helping to lower these rates.
Now those people will be back on AFDC, and Food Stamps. Or worse, they could – if they get caught growing, end up in jail, at a cost of some $ 30K a year!
This article nails the biggest challenge to legalization measures; you’ve got to be able to attract women voters.
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=10723
It was lack of female support that killed Oregon’s Measure 80. Win over this group and you win the vote. So the question becomes – how can the goal of ending marijuana prohibition be framed such that women will support it? The answer should consider that, according to recent polling, the number one issue with this group is jobs and the economy.
Just thinking about my last post. So here is a “back of the envelope” estimate of the jobs that a marijuana industry might create . . .
3 years ago, the US alcoholic beverage industry accounted for almost 2 million direct jobs and $167B in direct sales.
http://www.discus.org/assets/1/7/2009-Economic-Contribution-Report.pdf
Annual marijuana sales in the US were estimated to be somewhere around $40B in 2010.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/36179677
Keep in mind that the actual number may be substantially higher. Also, this figure would probably increase once prohibition is discarded. So, if you did a simple ratio of employment to sales using a similar industry (alcoholic beverages), you get:
$40B/$167B = 24% * 2M employees or approximately 480,000 employees for a marijuana industry.
Like I said, this is just a back of the envelope calculation. If these numbers were refined and proved to be credible, it seems like one campaign strategy would be to stress that ending marijuana prohibition could create “thousands of new jobs in our state.”
I can’t offer up many numbers, and am glad to think you took the time offer up some.
I do know that once the pot dispensaries were up and running in California, the state got about 225 to 250 million a year, for Fiscal Year 2011. And had the DOJ left us alone, that figure would have been much higher.
I also know that the sheriff of either Humboldt or Mendocino county saw so much county revenue coming in, in terms of local taxes, that they became a convert to medical marijuana. That particular county could hire new police and keep those police they might have terminated. (Calif’s economy is in pink slip mode.) So the idea that growing a plant could save the county was a persuasive one.
Then Obama’s DOJ hit California’s dispensaries and hit them hard.
People in other states do not realize how much effort was put into:
1) getting the original Proposition on the ballot and getting it passed (Way back in 1999)
2) then dealing with more local situations – like seeing that a clinic could be in this neighborhood or that one. Getting exemptions if the clinic was near a school, or a school bus route, etc.
Activists have spent years of their lives on the above – which Obama effectively wiped out in just a bit over fourteen months!
it is also very hard to figure out the jobs side of the equation, since this industry has many “down line” jobs created in its wake. I do know that “after Harvest’ the restaurants are flourishing, the furniture stores feature big “Harvest” sales, etc.