Bill Keller has an op-ed in The New York Times today titled "How to Legalize Pot," in which he looks at the questions faced by Washington State and Colorado as they tries to create an aboveground marijuana market. Keller talks to Mark Kleiman, a policy expert who's offering Washington State legal advice on this. What strikes me about Keller's description is how non-laissez-faire the thinking is there:
One practical challenge facing the legalization pioneers is how to keep the marijuana market from being swallowed by a few big profiteers -- the pot equivalent of Big Tobacco, or even the actual tobacco industry -- a powerful oligopoly with every incentive to turn us into a nation of stoners. There is nothing inherently evil about the profit motive, but there is evidence that pot dealers, like purveyors of alcohol, get the bulk of their profit from those who use the product to excess. "When you get a for-profit producer or distributor industry going, their incentives are to increase sales," said Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon, another member of the Washington consulting team. "And the vast majority of sales go to people who are daily or near-daily consumers."I bring this up because, in the print edition of today's Times, the Keller op-ed sits right above an "advertorial" (PDF) from the Washington Legal Foundation, a wingnut-welfare group funded by right-wing foundations. The ad complains about the targeting of certain foods as unhealthy:
What Kleiman and his colleagues (speaking for themselves, not Washington State) imagine as the likely best model is something resembling the wine industry -- a fragmented market, many producers, none dominant. This could be done by limiting the size of licensed purveyors.
We are constantly barraged with preachy messages and bad news about our food and drink choices. Advocacy-tinged studies accuse salt, sugar, and other essential food ingredients of causing countless "preventable" deaths. Quotable chefs and talk-show doctors implore us to absolutely avoid this snack or that beverage.See why I'm linking the two? In Washington State, according to Keller, the regulators want to make sure weed isn't taken over by "Big Pot," which will target, and rely on, excessive users. But what do you think is going to happen as more and more Americans accept the notion of legalized weed? The right is going to get on the libertarian side of this, especially in purple and red states (or, for that matter, any state with GOP control), and "Big Pot" is precisely what we're going to get: lower-quality mass-produced weed marketed to heavy smokers, and a regulatory mechanism as limited as lobbyists can make it.
Such condescending demonization is not only intended to shame us into "healthier" diets, it's also aimed at building support for government policies like sin taxes, advertising restrictions, and even bans or limits on food. To advance their regulatory agenda, activists have also sharpened their accusations that Big Food and Big Soda, and not overeating consumers, are directly responsible for a fatter America.
What they're trying to do in Washington State right now will be denounced as intolerable nanny-state-ism. It will be fought vigorously, until Big Pot dominates the market.
Oh, I suppose, after the small growers are driven out of business, we might have a comeback of high-priced, niche-market "artisanal" weed. But in the meantime it'll be Miller-and-Bud-level weed dominating the market for a few decades. Because: freedom.
