“Grow and Give” Is a Terrible Plan for D.C. Pot Legalization

Colorado, Washington, and now Oregon and Alaska
are more or less following the model for legalizing and regulating
a drug that was set out after alcohol prohibition ended. The

initiative that passed in Washington, D.C., yesterday is a
little different.

Over at Slate, Mark
Kleiman notes that the law, as written, suggests something like
a “grow and give” system, in which residents are permitted to
cultivate, consume, and gift the drug, but the current ban on money
changing hands between growers and consumers remains in place.
The Daily Beast
chimes in in favor as well, decrying the “green rush” that has
occurred in other states and noting that “as we’ve seen with the
alcohol industry, the private profit-driven market of a drug can be
dangerous.”

(The D.C. City Council is
already working on a more conventional system, which would
permit the licensing of growers and distributors, but the future is
hazy.)

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s right:
Three cheers for the laboratories of democracy and all that.
But “grow and give” is not going to work. And it’s not going to
work for reasons succinctly described
right in the middle of that Slate article about how
well it’s going to work:

It wouldn’t generate any tax revenue, or offer consumers the
same convenience or product variety as a commercial system, and of
course policing the boundary between “giving” and “selling” would
be virtually impossible. But it might be a big improvement on
the current prohibition. Eliminating organized marketing would
likely lead to a much smaller increase—if any—in cannabis abuse
than we would expect if we sell pot the way we now sell beer.

That “of course” is a really big deal. Contained in that “of
course” is all the violence and seediness of black markets, abuse
of search powers by the police, the large scale incarceration of
low-level drug offenders, and much, much more. “Grow and give”
would be an improvement on total prohibition, but it would also be
a step backward, a failure to learn from the lessons
of the experiments in Colorado and Washington State.

Kleiman quite reasonably asks: “Are we really satisfied with the
results of the current alcohol system?” Reason‘s answer
has long been clear: Nope! 

But the addiction, safety, and health costs associated with
alcohol use aren’t caused by the fact that people can legally buy
and sell the stuff. Money changing hands for a bottle of clearly
labeled, cleanly manufactured gin in a well-lit store with regular
hours is by far the most wholesome part of the whole life-cycle of
booze. 

By taking the money out of legal weed in D.C., the city will not
somehow elevate the exchange of marijuana to a higher, more
altruistic plane. Instead, it will force users and providers to
continue to operate outside the law and live with dangerous
uncertainty about what they’re buying, who they’re buying it from,
and what happens if the deal goes bad.