NEW YORK TIMES: … In Washington, D.C., it’s now legal to possess marijuana, to grow it, to smoke it and to give it away. But you’re not allowed to trade in it. You can give your neighbor up to an ounce, but if he gives you money or even bakes you a pie in exchange, that’s illegal…
[Professor Mark] Kleiman warns that full-scale commercial legalization comes with costs of its own. The main risk is that marijuana businesses will — as alcohol and tobacco companies did — successfully market their products to heavy users who would be better off using less, and that they will resist regulations that discourage problem use.
A recent RAND research brief says 80 percent of marijuana consumption is by daily and near-daily users. “So roughly 80 percent of marijuana companies’ profits would come from marketing to such heavy users, about half of whom currently meet clinical criteria for substance use disorders (either with marijuana itself or another substance, such as alcohol),” it concluded… (more)
EDITOR: The article is thoughtful and provides useful information and a variety of viewpoints. We recommend reading in its entirety.
Even though I prefer a regulated market that also allows personal cultivation, since DC could not do that because of the federal government, we will now be able to compare the two models. Which will reduce harms of prohibition — regulation or non-commercial or gift distribution? It should be an interesting test.
The 80% figure is pretty misleading. This is true for every product. They are not saying 80% of users are daily or near daily users, but that 80% of consumption comes from daily or near daily users. That is the same for alcohol and beer (and orange juice!) as well. Even though a minority of users are daily consumers, the vast majority of product used comes from them.
KZ
I think the Kleiman and company argument is that because most consumption is by heavy users, a significant portion of who use heavily are dependent, that a small increase in the number of heavy users would mean a large increase in consumption and dependence, and the resulting harms. They argue that recent research indicates heavy users to actually be price-sensitive, contrary to intuition, because the substance makes up a larger share of their personal budgets, and that lowered prices as legalization should provide is therefore likely to increase not only the number of heavy users, but also the average amount that they use. And of course they argue that commercial promotion will increase all of these effects.
Where I think they go wrong, or some of them go wrong, is in assuming that increase use and the harms related to use would mean increased total harm. They acknowledge that prohibition increases the average harmfulness of drugs, to their users at the times that they are using (decreased average harm per unit drug use, expressed analytically), but argue that increased use rates will more than make up the difference. But they never actually demonstrate this.
I also think they tend not to give sufficient weight to the harm caused by increased prices, while emphasizing the benefits of increased prices for reducing use. For example, in a paper in the second LSE Ideas compilation, Kleiman and another author pointed out that higher marijuana prices means some harm to users, if only from having less money left to spend on other things. But they dismissed the argument as unlikely to be important, because marijuana users can probably afford to pay for it, or something similar to that. That seems way to quick to me, especially from people who like to point out that people who may be dependent on marijuana account for most of its use, and that a lot of use takes place in low-income brackets. If they’re dependent, then they’re likely to spend money that they can’t afford on it, if that’s what they need to do, and if they’re low income that will take even more of a financial toll.
I delved into this debate in my recent law review article. It can be downloaded from http://stopthedrugwar.org/files/articles-by-david-borden.pdf, using password “cbprlopwenj” to access. (The second article in the document does have a public link now, if anyone wants it.)