Washington's Dilemma: How to Implement Legal Marijuana ( I hate the word marijuana by the way)

[Bennyboy]

Mark A. R. Kleiman's company, BOTEC Analysis, has been hired by Washington's Liquor Control Board to help the state draft rules and regulations for its legal marijuana system.

Kleiman, a professor of public policy at UCLA, has long been recognized as a drug policy authority. His resume is impressive, as is his output as a writer. Specific to marijuana policy, he's a co-author of the 2012 book, Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know.

Kleiman has always been critical of the drug war, yet he's also been at odds with reformers and most attempts at marijuana-law reform. He noted this on his blog on Mar. 19: "In 2010, I wrote an op-ed for the L.A. Times pointing out the problems with Proposition 19, the proposal to legalize cannabis in California. The post focused on the conflicts between that proposal and federal law. That has led to some queries about how someone who wrote that op-ed can help implement the Washington law. A fair question...“

Now, rather than seeing legalization as something a state can't do, he seems to view marijuana legalization in Washington as a sort of grand social experiment. ”Ask me five years from now what I think about legalization and maybe I’ll have an opinion worth listening to," Kleiman writes. "My stated opinion is that a non-commercial system - grow-your-own plus consumer-owned co-ops - would likely outperform an alcohol-style commercial system, weighing advantages against disadvantages. But that’s not in the cards politically, because it doesn’t raise revenue. And it makes more sense as a national policy than as a state-level policy. Legal grow-your-own in one state could easily lead to a massive export trade: that’s the risk facing Colorado. Washington, which doesn’t allow home-growing, doesn’t face that risk. Just as well."

In terms of Washington's program, Kleiman has been throwing some cold water on over-heated expectations of cannabis revenue, most recently in a televised interview on the program Inside Olympia. “Washington state shouldn't hold its breath for a major pot tax revenues," David Downs writes in Oakland's East Bay Express about the interview. "That's because the state's heaviest weed smokers are already growing and buying inside Washington's medical marijuana regime - where recreational taxes do not apply.”


Lots more. lots of interesting stuff in here...


http://www.celebstoner.com/blogs/doug-mcvay/2013/04/03/washingtons-dilemma-how-to-implement-legal-marijuana/

[msongs]

1. if you can't grow your own it is not legalization - just government/corprate hijacking of pot nt

[ThomThom]

2. cannabis is the name, marijuana is a slur

pot is slang
legalize now everywhere
it is not fair to let some and not the rest

[Warren DeMontague]

3. Legalization makes sense from every angle- moral, philosophical, practical, financial.

Even if the revenue doesn't materialize, the savings from scaling back the "drug war" would be substantial.

[bemildred]

4. Hemp has always been legal, even encouraged, except for Anslinger's crusade.

There is no problem, just get the fuck out of the way.

[malcolmkyle]

5. Kleiman is a prohibitionist; do not expect the truth!

If the intent here is to subvert the will of the voters then they couldn't have made a better choice than Mark Kleiman, a prohibitionist who has dedicated most of his life to opposing any move towards a saner drug policy.

Kindly google "Kleiman is a prohibitionist" and you'll see articles going back decades.

"Third, even on those rare occasions where Kleiman does not endorse prohibitionist policy, his analysis is infused with a prohibitionist morality. In his often superb chapter on marijuana, his evidence forces him to consider alternatives. Yet he is reluctant at every turn. He brings himself to admit that the costs of the current prohibition (e.g. each year 350 000 arrests and up to 10 billion dollars in enforcement costs and lost revenue) are probably too great for the 'benefits' received. But he still conceives of the alleged deterrent value of prohibition as a benefit, and again implies that he believes marijuana use is in itself somehow 'bad'."

—Prohibitionism in Drug Policy Discourse by Craig Reinarman, University of California, Santa Cruz,
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF DRUG POLICY, 1994. VOL 5 NO 2.

"He also bases his support for prohibition on the fact that the criminal justice system does not do a good enough job of preventing drug-related crime. Most informed observers, however, trace many of the problems in our criminal justice system to the burden and corruption placed on it by narcotics prohibition. Finally, I would note that even Mr. Kleiman realizes that only a small percentage of the population develops abuse problems with any specific drug and that we do not know what makes a given person have an abuse problem with a given drug. Why then does he recommend a nationwide policy that is oppressive, impersonal, and ineffective?

—Mark Thornton, Auburn University.
A Review of Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results, 1992.

Make no mistake, Mark Kleiman is a typical parasitic-gravy-trainer who has spent his whole life leeching off the government (our) purse. Do not expect him to do anything to derail his own gravy train!

[Bennyboy]

6. Actually, and the article bears this out,

he has changed his tune.

[TeamPooka]

7. Prohibition is a failed public policy...again.

Legalizing cannabis turns a money pool controlled by cartels into a revenue stream of jobs, taxes and products that benefit all citizens.