Category: Medical Cannabis

by Dominic Corva, Social Science Research Director

Legal Cannabis Phase I, for our interview subjects, overlapped with another State legal regime, Initiative 75, which was codified as RCW 69.51.A in 1998. Washington State medical cannabis laws were first passed by citizen initiative in 1998 and amended legislatively multiple times until 2011. The 2011 amendment, SB 5073, was a legislative bill requiring the State to regulate and tax commercial medical cannabis. It was the culmination of over a decade of then-Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles collaboration with Washington State medical cannabis patients and stakeholders. Those efforts continued for four years, until SB 5052 swallowed them up by folding medical cannabis regulation into the I 502 framework in 2015. First, let’s clarify this timeline, and then let’s discuss how this is relevant to our study of Legal Cannabis Phase I.

The timeline goes something like this.

1. Medical Phase I: 1998- April, 2011. Key legal framework: affirmative defense for possession; evolving criteria for authorizations; and evolving plant counts.

2. Medical Phase II: April 29, 2011 — July 1, 2016. Key legal framework change: commercialization tolerated in policy, especially in Seattle and King County, via a noncommercial clause, “collective gardens.”

3. Legal Phase I: I 502 (December 2012/13 — April 28, 2015/July 1, 2016). Key legal framework: an explicitly non-medical system regulated by the WSLCB.

4. Legal Phase II: July 1, 2016- .  Key legal framework: a single integrated medical and non-medical system regulated by the WSLCB, plus other reforms to the 502 law. 

      5. Overlap: April 28, 2015-July 1, 2016. Medical Phase II and Legal Phase I co-exist.

This timeline could easily be broken up further. For instance, the 2008 liberalization of authorization authority had a significant impact on the availability of authorized consumers for access points. And the 2011 legislative vehicle was the first of Senator Kohl-Welles’ reform efforts that sought to regulate patient access, rather than improve patient access. Between 2008 and 2011, something or some things happened to centralize legal reform efforts away from “more cannabis and more patients” to “discipline unruly State cannabis markets.” This is the subject of another book or chapter, however.

Instead, we want to understand the dynamics of Medical policy and markets as continuous and parallel to the dynamics of Legal policy and markets. And to do that, we have to unpack the evolution of both processes in relation to and separate from each other. We want to use Medical Phase I to break up and analyze Legal Phase I as the upstart — or start-up — framework with messy and unanticipated dynamics, not a homogenous legal time in which one thing logically followed another until it was time for Legal Phase II in Washington State.

In fact, the reason they evolved separately had less to do with the passage of I 502 than the way the WSLCB chose to implement it. And the way they chose to implement it was to create a completely different system rather than to use State Medical markets as a foundation. This is probably the defining characteristic of the “Washington model,” since no other state has chosen to do it that way.

The WSLCB took about 10 months to go from figuring out what cannabis was at the most basic level to implementing a “starting from scratch” model. For the first six months or so, that process was dominated by public and private meetings across the state so the Board could learn from existing cannabis market stakeholders a few things about the commodity they were charged with regulating. Starting in about April 2013, that process overlapped with a more academic exercise, in which BOTEC was contracted to estimate the size of the cannabis market, its potential environmental impacts, and so forth.

By the fall of 2013, the WSLCB had decided on a course of action that may or may not have been understood by the bureaucracy itself as a model for starting from scratch. There would be a one month window for applications, some time to process producer and processor applications, and then a lottery for retail applications, then some time to process those, and then by June 2014 Legal Phase I would open for business. This is a well-known timeline, but we emphasize two things about it that are poorly understood.

First, the applicant pool was much larger and different from what the WSLCB expected. Instead of a few hundred experienced applicants, they received a few thousand applications, many of whom were “gaming the system” by forging real estate claims and creating rings of applicants from friends, family, or straight up business associates to maximize their odds in the retail lottery or gain control of more canopy than they could otherwise.

And second, applicants to the 502 system were applying to a system that was legally forbidden from making any medical or therapeutic claims about cannabis. Although some of our interview subjects anticipated that this would change, it was a great disincentive to existing Medical Cannabis stakeholders against joining the I 502 system. This applies especially to retail access points, whose products and customer base revolved centrally around making those claims. But it also applies to producers and processors, since medical markets themselves continued to evolve away from simply growing high THC sinsemilla flower, towards CBD-rich cultivars, extracts, and edibles of much greater potency and diversity than would appeal to “recreational” consumers in the new system.

The takeaway for this post is that while the WSLCB may or may not have intended to “start from scratch” with I 502 stakeholders that were overwhelmingly new to cannabis, that’s how it worked out. This is most clear for the retail side of things, in which the lottery system could have by chance favored existing Medical Cannabis access points, but the odds were pretty slim given the amount of applicants and the way they gamed the system.

This is how it shook out for our interviewees. One of them “won” a lottery position outright, but was derailed repeatedly over real estate and business partnership issues. One of them acquired a Shoreline lottery position very early, and once a few of the winning lottery positions failed to take advantage, had their Seattle number come up. They have a Sodo location now. Two others drew extremely low lottery numbers whose numbers never came up. And one did not apply at all, figuring that the two systems would remain separate given that the 502 system was not allowed to be medical in any way. We will address who these are, and how this process shook out, in the book.

by Dominic Corva, Social Science Research Director

Last Thursday, Dr. Corva gave CASP’s first public presentation of our book-in-progress, “Washington State Legalization Phase I: An Ethnographic Report from the Perspective of Medical Transitioners.” We will be rolling out pieces of it on this blog through August, and this post introduces the book by explaining up front why we focus on stories of Medical Transition.

The unique value of the book project is its focus on the experiences of Medical Cannabis Transitioners, people and businesses that established livelihood identities as Medical Cannabis stakeholders before deciding to become Legal Cannabis stakeholders. For most, this means becoming a business licensed under the I 502 system. We have conducted 18 in-depth interviews ranging from one to seven hours long, since February. These interviews were transcribed, coded, and we are now in the process of writing four chapters. I’ll talk about those in a moment.

The choice to focus on Medical Transitioners is a calculated one. Here is a short list of reasons, in no particular order, which when put together make a powerful argument for the relevance and salience of this approach.

1. Our interest in cannabis legalization is continuous with our interest in the historical arc of cannabis policy reform. Law and Policy reforms have built on one another over time, and formal legalization is but the next step in a process whose social dynamics require past progress. No single entity or moment can claim singular responsibility for legalization: it’s the outcome of a social movement, not a campaign that breaks radically with the past. Transitioner stories make this abundantly clear.
2. Our interest in successful transitioners excludes both non-transitioners and new market actors. These two groups deserve careful study and research, but given the infancy of our State Legal Cannabis policy experiment we find that official efforts (such as the annual WSIPP report) focus almost exclusively on I 502 as a New Market/Policy; and that State actors are indifferent-to-hostile to non-transitioner stakeholders. Transitioner stories help us identify what kinds of knowledge are or can be transitioned into the new system.
3. Transition knowledge comes from a fundamentally different cultural reality than New Market and Policy knowledge. Transitioner culture is post-prohibition in that it proceeds from civil disobedience to Federal Prohibition, from medical and underground cannabis values in which the plant is not, fundamentally, a threat to society. New Market and Policy culture remains tied to the “social threat” meaning of cannabis in a lot of ways, but chiefly through compliance with the Federal Cole Memo.
4. There is a fundamentally practical side to examining Transitioner knowledge, since these are the people have far more experience with the plant, its markets, its cultural identities, and even the practice of regulatory compliance with local and State officials than New Market actors. They are the ones who have worked with policymakers and the public to get open as licensed businesses in the absence of central licensing law and policy. They have developed relationships with their communities, police, fire inspectors, and City and County officials, in a way that New Market actors have not. They have developed an organic local legitimacy necessary for sustainable businesses, and translated that legitimacy to the state by becoming licensed I 502 businesses.
5. The system needs them, therefore — needs that experience and knowledge that comes from creating social trust in the absence of State endorsement. It’s clear that State endorsement doesn’t lead to social trust, necessarily, as evidenced by the Bans and Moratoria that make our State Policy experiment a rather uneven one, geographically. The knowledge about he plant is vital, too, as evidenced by SB 5052’s intention to “protect” medical access through the I 502 system past July 1. The recreational system was literally not allowed to make any kind of claims about cannabis as medicine for Phase I, and desperately needs stakeholders with experience and knowledge of cannabis as medicine to comply with SB 5052’s mandate.
6. Transitioners have a nuanced critique of our State Policy experiment that is necessary for a robust understanding of not just the outcomes of our State Policy experiment, but the process of designing it. Annual WSIPP reports will provide fantastic information on the results of the experiment, but they’ll never provide a productive and transparent critique of its design and administration. “Productive critique” here does not mean criticism, it means analysis of the power relationships that steer the ship, to mix metaphors, in the direction it says it wants to go: away from prohibition. Transitioners aren’t hamstrung by prohibition culture, so they don’t have to discipline what they say to reflect the Cole Memo’s prohibition values.
7. Finally, CASP as an organization has spent most of its research efforts on Medical Cannabis organizers and organization. Thus, this ethnography is the outcome of three years in the field for Dr. Corva and Dr. Sexton, not just 18 processed ethnographic interviews. The legitimacy of the interviews as a basis for research reports rests on this fieldwork “embeddedness”: we knew what questions to ask because we were there and often part of it. There is a “participant-observation” aspect to this ethnography, which in the social sciences comes with its strengths and weaknesses. We will address those at length in the methodology section of the book.

This is the first in what should be a summer-long release of different parts of the book as we fill out the chapters from the interview evidence collected. We hope to have a full draft done by August 1, 2016. Our next post will focus on the structure and process of the book, which is more the production of a collaborative research network than any single author. For now, let’s acknowledge authoring collaborators — later we will acknowledge our interview subjects themselves. Our interns are Hillary Bernhardt and Paul Jamison; Dr. Michelle Sexton and Brad Douglass of the Wercshop are primary contributors to the Lab chapter so far, but Dr. Jim MacRae will be getting his crack at it once Brad sends us his comments; Dr. MacRae is also a substantive contributor to the Producer/Processor chapter. And of course Dr. Corva is cat-herder in chief of the project.