Fear Of Cannabis Commerce Didn’t, Won’t, and Shouldn’t Stop Legalization

The voters who
approved marijuana legalization in two states and Washington,
D.C., on Tuesday were unswayed by warnings that capitalism and
cannabis are a dangerous mix. In my latest
Forbes column, I probe the weaknesses of that
message. Here is how the piece starts:

Three marijuana legalization initiatives were on the ballot this
week, and all
three won. That’s a better outcome than I was expecting. I was
surprised when voters in Colorado and Washington approved
legalization two years ago, and I was surprised again when
voters in Alaska, Oregon, and Washington, D.C., followed suit.

Partly that’s because, after 25 years of advocating drug
legalization (along with various other unpopular positions), I am
accustomed to  losing. But it’s also because I had looked at
the polling
data. The victory in D.C. seemed like a pretty sure thing,
given the legalization initiative’s 2-to-1 advantage in
a September
survey commissioned byThe Washington Post. But
the poll numbers were much closer in Oregon and Alaska.

There were other reasons for low expectations. I doubted that
Oregonians and Alaskans would be eager to imitate Colorado and
Washington so soon after the votes there, especially given that
legal recreational sales began only this year in both states. And
like the activists who are waiting until 2016 to push initiatives
in states such as California and Massachusetts, I thought
legalization would have a better shot in a presidential election
year.

Judging from the ebullient reactions I saw on Twitter, I was not
the only antiprohibitionist who was pleasantly surprised by
Tuesday’s amazing cannabis trifecta. Yet anti-pot activist Kevin
Sabet—who a week earlier had joked, in
an interview with The New York Times, that “it
looks bad; I want to be on the other team”—claimed “this
was not the complete slam-dunk the legalization groups expected.”
Later Sabet, co-founder and president of the prohibitionist group
Project SAM, told the
Associated Press, “I think we’ve slowed the legal-marijuana freight
train.”

As you probably have figured out by now, I am not given to
optimism about the prospects for drug policy reform. But Sabet’s
spin seems delusional even to me. If the legalization train has
slowed, that’s only because so many people are clamoring to get
aboard. And if Sabet has failed to stop it, that’s because he
unrealistically expects voters to be horrified at the very thought
of a profit-driven cannabis industry.

Read the whole thing.