I know the president has bigger problems (they always do) but he should find a way to implement a sensible federal marijuana policy, because what he has been doing is inadequate and has caused a lot of injustice. It’s particularly troubling coming from a former member of the Choom Gang.
In the new issue of the Washington Monthly there is extensive coverage of the challenges associated with the legalization of marijuana.
Here’s editor in chief Paul Glatris, explaining:
In a devastating critique in the Washington Monthly, two experts who have advised Washington State on its marijuana legalization, Mark Kleiman and Jonathan Caulkins, warn that the current approach being taken by that and other states will lead to a public health disaster. It will result in a marijuana market dominated by large commercial interests whose profits will come not from occasional pot smokers but from habitual daily (even hourly) users. We’ll see marijuana commercials on Super Bowl broadcasts, pot brownies at 7-Eleven checkout counters, a vast increase in abuse, minimal tax revenues, and government regulators too weak to do anything about it.
This dystopia can be avoided, say the authors, by cutting out the corporate sector and limiting marijuana sales to government or nonprofit stores. But that won’t happen unless the federal government takes charge of the legalization juggernaut, and soon. Also, as Jonathan Rauch argues, the biggest threat to marijuana legalization is bad implementation of the kind we saw last fall with health care exchanges.
I guess they are thinking of something like Pennsylvania’s state-run liquor stores. It’s hard for me to envision state-run pot stores, but maybe it’s possible.
I think President Obama should, at a minimum, ask the Department of Health & Human Services and the Federal Drug Administration to do a new study and make recommendations on whether or not marijuana should remain as a Schedule One drug. Presuming that the study justifies lowering the scheduling classification, he ought to go ahead and approve that. And he needs to have his pardon pen ready, because he needs to rectify a whole lot of bad arrests that have taken place on his watch.
