Category: Oregon

Why Postprohibition?

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by Dominic Corva, Executive Director

I’m deeply unsatisfied with the ways we talk about cannabis legalization right now. Policymakers talk about it as a technical problem, opponents talk about it as a social threat, proponents talk about it as an end goal in itself, businesspeople talk about it as a financial gold rush, progressives talk about it as a social justice fix, and public health officials talk about it as a health risk, to name a few ways of talking about it that strike me as serving particular agendas that are different from mine.

I want to talk about legalization as a social problem.  Not because legalization as a general idea is a social problem, but because the way we are doing legalization isn’t making a clean break from prohibition. And prohibition has always been a really big social problem. This is why I want to talk about postprohibition: legalization with, not after, prohibition.

This makes things difficult, because I don’t think we really understand prohibition very well. This applies across the spectrum, including people who fight against prohibition as well as neo-Prohibitionists.

I think we understand prohibition as a legal problem pretty well, but not as a cultural problem. Laws reflect and institutionalize cultural values about what, and who, must be controlled by the State’s monopoly on violence in society.

The authority of the State to use that monopoly against people who use the wrong drugs the wrong way, in a liberal democracy, requires a fairly liberal tolerance of authoritarian attitudes throughout the population: a willingness to conduct war without end.

So to me, prohibition is one expression of authoritarian culture in a “free” society. It’s politics as the extension of war by other means. I’m not big on war, and I certainly object to the open-ended militarization of society against elements of its own population that aren’t hurting anyone else because they grow, distribute, or consume a plant.

I like plants. I think they teach us a lot about being a part of a living ecosystem, especially if we co-exist with them in ways that are more than commodified.

So if our current round of “experiments in democracy” that we call legalization are hamstrung by cultural attitudes about how dangerous a plant is; and how deferential we need to be towards still-actually-existing Federal Prohibition laws despite their really obviously political, rather than scientific, origins; then I have a problem with what legalization means and therefore how we talk about it.

There are many many ways to disagree with me about my problems with legalization that are really problems with democratic authoritarianism. But the demonstrably correct observation that new State and local legal frameworks exist alongside and in tension with National, Global, State, and Local cannabis prohibitions isn’t one of them.

So let’s start there, with the empirical fact that we are dealing with a complex legal landscape with conflicting and/or badly aligned elements. This observation does not lead necessarily to agreeing with my cultural analysis of postprohibition, but it does establish a common sense ground for talking about cannabis legalization beyond whether it’s good or evil.


Popular Anxieties

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Popular Anxieties: Controlling Cannabis and Other Markets at the End of the World

by Dominic Corva, Political Geographer

This post is a preview of the talk I will give in Portland on September 27, 2018, hosted by the Commune PDX and the Initiative. The one hour lecture will include time for gathering before and after, between 6:30 and 9. Suggested donation at the door is $10, though anyone for whom this amount is a hardship is welcome regardless. Conversely, since the lecture serves as a fundraiser for The Center for the Study of Cannabis and Social Policy, we are grateful for folks who can give more. The paragraph in bold serves both as a general abstract and introductory paragraph for an extended preview of the talk.

It is more important than ever to differentiate populist anxieties from ones grounded in real social problems for which we have plenty of evidence but weak individual and institutional capacity with which to deal. The liberation of a plant and its people from prohibition law and policy must contend not only with the persistence of prohibition culture, but broader anxieties about the way things are now, at large, for which legal cannabis markets may seem like adding fuel to the fire. This talk identifies the landscape of post-prohibition as embedded in wider anxieties about the world in which we live and what to do about it, as a political and economic history of the present.

The liberalization of cannabis control has arrived rather late to conditions of modernity that have been broadly characterized in the social sciences as “neoliberalism” for the last several decades. The second stage of cannabis prohibition, dating from 1971, emerged as a reaction against the people associated with the New Left of the 1960s, rather than scientific evidence that the plant itself posed a substantive public health threat to the population. The political and economic conditions that gave cannabis prohibition new life were part of the “culture wars” of the New Right — the generalization of anxieties about security in society at large.

That reaction was materialized as an extension of the welfare-warfare state, a massive expansion of the prison-industrial complex that fit uneasily alongside neoliberal tendencies to marketize public policy, deregulate financial markets, and, from the center-left, otherwise expand cultural freedoms. It was a security exception to the politics and economics of freedom, consolidated as a bipartisan consensus during the Clinton administration. Anxieties about public health are the cultural building blocks of prohibition culture, never mind the total absence of scientific evidence that formed them.

Anxieties about cannabis as a threat to public health and social order now form the institutional barriers to liberating, rather than liberalizing, cannabis from deeply institutionalized  politics and policies of control. Alongside these hoary obstacles to sensible public policy, though, the general political and economic winds that shape public policy at large have shifted against the direction of progressive change. Generalized economic, political and ecological crises — the “end of the world,” so to speak — inform popular anxieties about political and economic change that are quite different from the crises that gave rise to neoliberal consensus.

As a result, the liberation of cannabis from the politics of control must contend not only with the “dead” labor of deceit and ignorance at the root of prohibition culture, but with entirely reasonable contemporary anxieties about what 40 years of neoliberal governance has wrought: industrial-pesticidal agriculture; hydrocarbon-fueled ecological crisis; corporate, pay-to-play democracy; the pharmaceutical marketing of better living through chemistry fueling opioid dependence and generalized mental health crises; the triumph of the military-industrial complex through permanent warfare; and so forth.

We are clearly not making much progress towards evidence-based public policy, in general — otherwise it wouldn’t seem so much like the end of the world.  Why would we expect post-prohibition cannabis policy to work any better than public policy tendencies, at large? If another world is possible, the struggle for sensible cannabis policy must be linked with the struggle for political and economic conditions that make space for social peace and resilience rather than economic and political warfare.

Three Questions for the Reform Conference

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by Dominic Corva, Executive Director

This year, the International Drug Policy Reform Conference (Reform) will be taking place next week in Atlanta, Georgia. This post lets our readers know about CASP’s presence at the Conference and what I will be doing there, as a participant in a panel titled “How has the Drug War Reshaped Space, Place, and Relationships?”

There are three kinds of public events CASP gets invited to speak at. Industry events provide a platform for addressing cannabis policy and markets in a way that reflects our commitment to optimizing cannabis legalization as a strategy for ending the drug war. Academic events provide a platform for reflecting on and improving the models of the world I work with and encounter. And Policy events provide me with a platform for direct intervention into ongoing discussions of policy formation.

The Reform conference is a bit of a hybrid between Academic and Policy events. It’s an international NGO (nongovernmental organization) production, hosted by the Drug Policy Alliance and the ACLU, which often partners with the DPA on domestic efforts. You can see from the title of the panel how academic the conversation is to be on my panel, which could be the title of a panel at the annual Association of American Geographers (AAG) Conference I presented at for most of my academic life.

As a result, it’s probably the sort of panel that I feel most comfortable in. I’m not industry, and in Policy conferences where bureaucrats and policymakers dominate I’m usually the most radical voice in the room, since my central concern is ending the drug war rather than doing politics. Or bureaucracy.

This panel is especially cool because it’s a conversation, rather than a group of individual presentations. The moderator for the panel recently reached out to prepare for the conversation by posing three or four questions with which we would like to engage. I offer the questions I sent back, and the reasons for doing so, here:

What is the relationship between legalizing cannabis in certain places and ending the drug war — in those places but more broadly?
This question places CASP’s mission into the context of an international drug policy framework. Cannabis legalization to this point has until recently been “sold” –and funded — on the assumption that cannabis legalization is an important step towards ending the drug war. These days, it seems that it’s now being sold as an engine for economic growth and associated tax revenue. As a result, the policies being called for, designed and implemented don’t seem to be all that interested in removing criminal penalties altogether for cannabis-related activity. On the other hand, there is no doubt that significant room for exception to criminal penalties is opening up, especially from the perspective of say, the Philippines, where drug war crimes and outright genocidal State policy continue with the support and funding of the U.S. government. There also doesn’t seem to be much carry-over from ending the war on cannabis to ending the war on drugs, full stop. Is cannabis being carved out as a militant particularism, an exception that allows the drug war to continue unopposed? If it is, and key voices and actors in the U.S. are “co-opted” by letting them have theirs, does cannabis legalization mean the continuation of the drug war? These are difficult questions, but they must be considered given the evidence so far.
What is the relationship between (neo)liberalizing space and demobilizing the drug war?
This is a question that has to do with the relationship between economic governance and prohibition. My interest in the relationship between the drug war and economic liberalization was sparked by trying to puzzle through the tension between the promotion of liberty, via “free market” governance, and the promotion of authoritarian control on certain populations, during the latest period of pretty intense economic globalization (since the 1970s). Whose liberty matters, politically, under conditions of intense economic inequality that is supposedly being remediated by neoliberal market governance? The hollowing out of State (this term refers approximately to governments at large, not just to Federal States) revenues under conditions of privatization absolutely blew up during the financial crisis of the last decade. U.S. federal States like Washington want and need cannabis tax revenue to replace budget shortfalls that used to be covered by income taxes and Federal transfers. As a result, policy discourse about cannabis legalization explicitly condone the punishment of informal sector markets and actors to protect State-designated monopolies. That’s how we lost medical cannabis in Washington State.
How are processes of creative destruction associated with drug war zones?

“Creative destruction” is a political economy term I learned about from studying Karl Polanyi, the Austro-Hungarian economic historian. It means that there’s a cost to market formation — that previous market and social orders are destroyed to make way for new engines of growth. It’s usually associated with urban gentrification or crisis profiteering. Under conditions of prohibition, the whole world is a drug war zone, as anthropologist Howard Campbell observes, but some spots are hotter than others: borders, inner cities and so forth. This is a broader question for which cannabis legalization provides some insight, particularly with respect to who can own the means of cannabis production in highly controlled markets with high barriers to entry. Headlines splash how many jobs are created by such markets, but what goes unsaid is to whom the gains accrue. The democratic aspect of informal cannabis markets was that everyone could be an owner or take a much better margin of the flows than they could as a $15/hour waged laborer. This spread the economic benefits of market development much wider than under conditions where you need half a million or a regulatory job to make much of a living. At the same time, however, there is a lot of truth to the claim that legal cannabis displaces the ability of highly organized crime to make much off of cannabis, any more. Cartel profits don’t accrue to the little people so much, and while I insist that cartel profits have been dwindling under conditions of medical cannabis (with a far more democratic and widely shared economy), I can’t ignore the truth that in general, we want to destroy the ability of those who use violence to manage risk to make anything.

So, that’s it. Those are my questions for the panel, and my preliminary thoughts about them. It will take place next week, Thursday, in Atlanta, Georgia. I am grateful to the Drug Policy Alliance for covering my flight and hotel room, for full disclosure.

How has the Drug War Reshaped Space, Place, and Relationships?

Thursday, October 12th, 4:30-6:00pm | Dogwood B Room, Floor M1

From prison towns to million dollar blocks (where more than a million dollars is spent to incarcerate men from one city block), drug policy is shaping what our communities and relationships look like. This session will explore: How has the drug war reshaped geography in the U.S.? What impact do these changes have on individuals and families? How does spatial shifts over time affect communities most impacted by the war on drugs? What are some current projects and solutions underway to address these shifts in geography?

Barriers to Understanding, Barriers to Change (Spanish translation)

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Many thanks to our Colombian reader, Ramiro Borja, for providing this translation to us! The original article in English can be found here.

Translated by Ramiro E. Borja / Colectivo Nueva de Abril

Dominic Corva, Director de Investigación en Ciencia Social Center for Study of Cannabis and Social Policy

En la presentación de ayer conté cómo empecé a explorar los mercados de cannabis y la política pública, y cómo se configuran entre sí. Mis amigos académicos reconocerán esto como un “marco teórico” -una técnica consistente en construir un modelo de mundo para que podamos entenderlo e intervenir.

Es un modelo de “economía política”, lo que significa que el usuario de esta técnica -el analista- necesita considerar cómo es que nuestra manera de ganarnos la vida y gestionar recursos conforma y está conformada por el poder que circula dentro de la sociedad. Eso es muy distinto de los modelos de la ciencia económica que suponen que todo ocurre por eleccion racional y utilidad marginal, modelos que aprendí cuando recibí mi grado como profesional en Economía.

También son distintos de los modelos de mundo que tiene la ciencia política, los que suponen que el Estado tiene en mente los intereses de cada quién cuando hace leyes y políticas públicas, y que distingue con claridad la seguridad de sus ciudadanos de la de los enemigos de éstos.

Mi audiencia ya no es pesadamente académica. Pero es importante que usted entienda cómo es que mi modelo de mundo es la base de mi modelo de la cannabis en el mundo. Como la mayoría de las aproximaciones académicas, debo equilibrar qué tan significativas quiero que sean mis explicaciones con el rigor analítico, para que tengan un efecto en la manera en que la gente piensa y actúa en el mundo. Quiero escoger batallas que pueda ganar, en vez de simplemente tener la razón y sentirme bien por eso.

Esto es especialmente difícil cuando se trata de responder a las preocupaciones que tienen las personas que hacen las leyes y las políticas públicas. Sus modelos de mundo simplemente no reflejan las realidades de los mercados y las políticas del cannabis, que sí entiendo mediante mi modelo. Ontologías inconmensurables, de verdad. Ellos no entienden qué tanto ha durado esto, no entienden de dónde sale la compulsión de prohibir, o quién está siendo prohibido; lo más importante es que no aceptan un modelo que dice que nuestra sociedad ha estado en guerra contra sí misma, una guerra real en la que se han perdido millones de vidas ante el complejo industrial de la seguridad, que es claramente peligroso y anti-paz, lo que mi modelo del mundo muestra.

El problema no es lo que ellos saben, sino cómo lo saben. Su modelo de mundo mira a la guerra contra las drogas como una metáfora, no como una realidad. Su modelo de mundo piensa que la peligrosidad de las drogas prohibidas está dada históricamente, y proviene de decisiones racionales hechas de buena fe por los representantes de la voluntad pública. Su modelo de mundo piensa que solo necesitamos reducir el daño de las drogas, más que considerar la guerra de la sociedad contra sí misma, la que causa no solo los daños de las drogas (que sí existen, parte de un problema social más amplio llamado sobreconsumo), también causa de Cosas Malas que no tienen nada que ver con los daños de las drogas, como hacer de la guerra perpetua una condición de bienestar económico.

¿Será que el problema aquí es una falta total de consenso entre nuestros modelos del mundo? Piénselo: para que la guerra contra las drogas termine de verdad, por razones que reflejen la realidad más que la política, nuestros políticos y formadores de política pública tendrían que admitir que nuestras leyes prohibicionistas y nuestro sistema de justicia penal no corresponden a un modelo de mundo en que suponemos que vamos mejorando en todo -que la Modernidad está venciendo la Barbarie, siempre mejorando nuestra seguridad en vez de presentar a cada paso nuevos modos de destruirnos. Que somos herederos de la tradición de la Ilustración. Que nuestro instinto es apoyar a los que son vulnerables entre nosotros y que las personas que actúan de buena fe pueden apropiarse de éste. Que se conoce el Bien y el Mal y que nuestras instituciones son diseñadas y operadas para hacer que las cosas sean mejores y no peores.

La situación contemporánea de la legalización de la cannabis ilustra este concepto a su modo, y puesto que afecta un segmento tan pequeño de la población que sufre de muchas otras maneras el hecho de que la modernidad resulta una fábula, y no una historia, de progreso e Ilustración, parece que tenemos que dar un paso atrás para seguir avanzando. Los políticos y los intereses económicos, quienes no tienen compromiso alguno con evaluar seriamente qué es lo que ha salido mal y cómo arreglarlo, son los que se están apropiando de las propuestas de legalización de la cannabis que han tenido éxito y de su radicalidad.

En cada Estado esto se da distinto, pero hasta ahora la promesa de legalizar la marihuana como estrategia para acabar la guerra contra las drogas está siendo reemplazada por intereses políticos que todavía están obsesionados -sin fundamento científico- con supuestos daños de la cannabis. Intereses que piden reformar nuestras leyes y políticas públicas pretendiendo que la guerra contra las plantas -y contra las personas cuyas vidas han sido un largo acto de desobediencia civil y de autonomía frente a los destrozos de la guerra racial y clasista- sea más suave y amable.

Las propuestas de legalización estatal son absolutamente revolucionarias frente al orden político de este país, donde la Ley de Sustancias Controladas centraliza en la autoridad Federal la decisión de dónde y cuándo ejercer violentamente sus prerrogativas contra la población, pasando por encima de la autoridad del Estado y la libertad Local.

En cada caso, sin embargo, las legislaturas Estatales están reconfigurando la legitimidad de la prohibición más que haciendo la paz con una planta que ha sido, a lo largo de toda la historia humana, una de las sustancias terapéuticas más seguras para el hombre. Ya es claro que luego de una era de marihuana médica caracterizada por la desmovilización política, la era de la marihuana legal estará caracterizada por un creciente pánico moral frente a la producción y el consumo de cannabis que se colorean por fuera de las barreras tan restrictivas puestas por los marcos legales. Pregúntele qué sentido tiene esto a las comunidades Hmong del norte de California.

¿Qué hacer? ¿Qué batallas escoger? Depende de su modelo de mundo, no solamente de su modelo de lo grandiosa que es la cannabis para el recaudo público y las arcas empresariales. Esto último puede ser una estrategia productiva al momento de apelar a los políticos y las poblaciones dedicadas a mantener el orden económico y político vigente -la gente que piensa: ‘sí, hay cosas malas que están pasando pero no hay que cuestionar hasta el fondo nuestras suposiciones, sino mejorarlas y reformarlas’.

En mi modelo de mundo, esta aproximación alimenta un complejo industrial de la seguridad que está destruyendo a la mayoría de nosotros, para beneficio de unos pocos y de las carreras políticas de muchos. Y lo hace no porque haya gente Mala haciendo cosas Malas (aunque la hay), sino porque hay gente completamente normal que trata de ayudar. Pero como su modelo de mundo no puede acomodar la realidad histórica o presente -o solo una parte- entre más quieren ayudar, más van siendo reemplazados los guerreros culturales como motor de la prohibición por el capital.

Lo que estamos viendo acá, compañeras, es la continuidad de la prohibición más que su fin. El apremio por castigar y estigmatizar ciertas poblaciones se renueva y reempaca para reproducir el orden de cosas vigente. Un modelo de economía política honesto cuestiona este Problema Social.”

Barriers to Understanding, Barriers to Change

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by Dominic Corva, Social Science Research Director

Yesterday I introduced a trailhead to exploring how cannabis markets and policy help shape each other. My academic friends should recognize this as a “theoretical framework” — a technique for building a model of the world so we can understand and intervene in it.

It’s a “political economy” model, which is to say that it requires the technique user — the analyst — to consider how power in society shapes and is shaped by how we mobilize resources and make livelihoods. It’s distinct especially from economic science models of the world that assume everything is happening because of rational choice and marginal utility, models I learned to get my undergraduate degree in Economics.

It’s also distinct from political science models of the world that assume that the State has everyone’s best interests in mind when they make law and policy, and that there is a clear distinction between the security of its citizens and the security of its citizen’s enemies.

My audience is not terribly academic, anymore. But it is important for you to understand how my model of the world informs my model of cannabis and the world. Like most academic approaches, I have to balance analytical rigor with just how much I want my explanations to mean something, to have an effect on how people think and act in the world. I want to pick battles I can win, rather than just be right and feel good about it.

This is especially difficult when it comes to addressing the concerns of people who make laws, who make policy. Their models of the world simply do not reflect the realities of cannabis markets and policy that I understand from mine. Incommensurable ontologies, really. They do not understand how long this has been going on, they do not understand where the compulsion to prohibit comes from, or who is being prohibited; most importantly they do not accept a model of society that says ours has been at war with itself, a real war with millions of lives lost to what is clearly a dangerous and anti-peace security-industrial complex, in my model of the world.

The problem is not with what they know, it’s how they know it. Their model of the world looks at the drug war as a metaphor, not a reality. Their model of the world thinks that the dangerousness of prohibited drugs is historically given, and comes from rational choices made by in good faith by representatives of the public will. Their model of the world thinks we only need to reduce the harm of drugs, rather than considering the harm of intrasocietal warfare as the cause not only of drug harms (which do exist, part of a larger social problem called overconsumption) but of Bad Things that have nothing to do with drug harms, like making perpetual war a condition for economic health.

Is it too much to say the problem here is a total lack of common ground in our models of the world? Think about it: to truly end the war on drugs, for the reasons that reflect reality rather than politics, our politicians and policymakers would have to admit that our prohibition laws and criminal justice policy don’t belong in a model of the world that assumes we are getting better all the time at everything — that Modernity is stamping out Barbarism, always making us safer rather than introducing new ways to destroy ourselves at every turn. That we are heirs to an Enlightenment tradition. That our instinct to help the vulnerable among us can be appropriated by good people acting in good faith. That Good and Evil have been worked out and that our institutions are designed an operated to make things better instead of worse.

The contemporary situation of cannabis legalization illustrates this concept in its own very specific way, and because it affects such a tiny segment of a population that is suffering from so many other ways in which the Modernity is a fable, rather than a story, of progress and Enlightenment, that it appears we must go backwards to go forward. The radical nature of successful cannabis legalization initiatives is being appropriated by politicians and economic interests who have no compulsion to seriously assess what has gone wrong and how to fix it.

It varies from state to state, but so far the promise of cannabis legalization as a strategy for ending the drug war is quickly replaced by political interests still obsessed with the scientifically baseless assumed harm of cannabis itself, that requires reforming our laws and policy to reflect a kinder, gentler war on plants and the people whose livelihoods have been one long act of civil disobedience, on the one hand; and autonomous from the ravages of the racial and class warfare on the other.

State legalization initiatives are absolutely revolutionary with respect this country’s political order, where the Controlled Substances Act centralizes Federal authority over State and Local freedom to decide when and where to exercise its prerogative on violence against its population.

In every case, though, State legislatures are reconfiguring the the legitimacy of prohibition rather than making peace with a plant that has been, in human history, one of the safest therapeutic substances known to man. It’s clear at this point that after a medical marijuana era defined by policy demobilization, the legal marijuana era will be defined by increased moral panic about cannabis production and consumption that colors outside the incredibly restrictive barriers to access put up by legal frameworks. Ask the Hmong communities of Northern California how this makes sense.

What to do, and what battles to pick? It depends on your model of the world, not just your model of how great cannabis is for public revenue and corporate coffers. The latter can be productive strategies for appealing to a politicians and populations invested in maintaining the current political and economic order — people who think yeah, some bad things are happening, but the assumptions we have don’t need to be fundamentally challenged, merely improved and reformed.

In my model of the world, this approach nurtures a security-industrial complex that is destroying most of us, for the profit of a few and the political careers of many. And it does so not because of Evil people doing Evil things (though there is that), but because of totally normal people trying to help. But because their model of the world can’t accommodate historical or present reality — or only partially accommodates reality — the more they help, the more money capital takes over from the culture warriors as what props up prohibition.

What we are looking at here, folks, is the continuity of prohibition instead of its end. The urge to punish and stigmatize certain populations gets rewired, retrofitted into the reproduction of the present order of things. An honest political economy model presents some challenge to this Social Problem.

 

 

Field Guide to Cannabis Markets and Policy: A Starting Point

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by Dr. Dominic Corva, Social Science Research Director

How are cannabis markets and policy experiments changing society? The first thing to understand is that cannabis markets, like all markets, exist in relation to State policy. We understand State policy through the lens of prohibition: the total ban on some drugs and drug plants. Clearly, there’s a radical transformation going on that means we really need to understand how prohibition is being transformed — radically — by State “experiments in democracy” associated with the paradox of States choosing to opt out of Federal law without leaving the Union itself.

This assertion, or axiom, or assumption, depending on one’s point of view, contradicts a lot of what you read in the headlines. Isn’t legalization changing cannabis markets by creating regulations and licensing schemes at a rapid rate? The answer is yes, but not as fast as media advertisers would have you believe. There are three up-and-running State-supervised legal cannabis markets right now — Washington and Colorado, who were first; and Oregon, which chose to fast-track its market development by taxing first and regulating later.

In the grand scheme of things none of these states are particularly significant relative to California consumption and production, for example –or, I would argue, New York City, where cannabis delivery services have been effectively decriminalized for decades.

The first question to ask for this introduction is, what are cannabis markets and how have they changed over time? Let’s narrow down our field of inquiry by time and place, focusing narrowly on the United States and the last 40 years or so. But let’s also start with the present.

At the present, there exists three discretely identifiable categories of cannabis market: black markets, medical markets, and taxed adult-use markets. Let’s simplify by using a color spectrum: black, gray, and white. Please note this is a spectrum, with both with and black bleeding into gray and vice versa. Later on perhaps we will try to think three dimensionally by looking at how white and black markets are more integrated than you might think.

It’s important to note that these colors, as I deploy them here, reflect a stigma-free taxonomy. None of these are assumed to be morally superior to the other, in my analysis here or at any time. This is a sharp difference from the way most people talk about them. I’m not trying to convince anyone to desire or not desire one over each other — in fact I insist that given their interdependency, it is not useful to do so.

I also reject arguments that using a color spectrum for taxonomy is inherently racist, since to accept that argument would mean applying it to all sorts absurdity, like the meaning of “black boxes” or “black operations.” We can argue about that later if readers insist.

The next thing to understand is that state policy is also a (possibly circular) continuum, from extremely punitive to bureaucratically regulated. This way to think about it is indebted to sociologists Harry Levine and Craig Reinarman, who insist that we think about prohibition as a continuum that reflects State interests that generally have to do with controlling undesirable populations; or geopolitical arrangements; or many other things that have nothing to do with drugs.

Levine’s framework accomplishes two things especially useful for figuring out current dynamics in landscapes of cannabis policy reform and market transformation.

The first has to do with understanding State Policy as an outcome of complex politics, rather than rational review or reformist attempts to improve the governance of free societies. This insight, drawn from the history of prohibition, helps us understand how cannabis legalization remains subject to highly political dynamics, to the exclusion of rational policy consideration.

The second has to do with understanding punitive prohibition, usually in the form of authoritarian policing, carceral fundamentalism, and sentencing policies, as a form of regulation. That is, prohibition doesn’t succeed in prohibiting. Instead it creates landscapes of risk of exposure to enforcement that are capitalized on by illicit (and now licit) market actors. Plenty of people do get caught! But those that get caught simply territorialize, or make real in the landscape, the value of avoiding getting caught. At times of high intensity, where lots of people or product get caught, the resulting market scarcity raises prices which make not getting caught far more profitable. Punitive policing creates more high risk, high reward markets, reflected in the trajectory of commodity prices at different parts of the value chain.

This insight helps us understand how current efforts to govern cannabis legalization are being pulled in many different directions, because they drastically shift the landscape of policing by introducing a much more robust and extended “other side” of punitive prohibition, that is marked by State efforts to regulate a market that was already being regulated (through policing); and remains in a sort of schizophrenic, bipolar relationship with different scales of government trying to do different things, from local municipalities that ban or zone out legal policy to an overarching Federal framework for which legal cannabis remains eligible for punitive prohibition, even if it isn’t being acted on right now.

This gets us to the highly volatile and dynamic contemporary phenomenon of cannabis legalization and market evolution. Or phenomena, since the policy geography of policy change is highly decentralized, while the new market processes are also highly decentralizing, as a tendency, because they create new spaces for cannabis production, processing, and distribution that are highly circumscribed by state borders.

We have two “axes” of analysis, State Policy and markets, that shape each other dialectically rather than being independent variables. And we have several dimensions of each to grapple with, since State Policy combines regulation and punishment even in the context of legalization; and since black-gray-white markets co-exist in the same territories of policy formation. Now we can begin to unpack the material realities to answer the question “how are cannabis markets and policy changing society.”

The Chemovar and the Cultivar

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by Dominic Corva, Social Science Research Director and Terpestival Producer

Our popular education panels and keynote talk by Dr. Ethan Russo at the Third Annual Original Terpestival represented an advanced seminar in whole plant education. I am incredibly grateful to and proud of our audience, who came to listen, learn and participate as well as any university seminar I have taught. I want to reflect on the complex whole after the fashion of a reaction paper, which in the formal educational setting is a method for making a short conversation about a substantive and often intense volume of readings or material on a particular topic that is rich with avenues for further exploration and engagement. It’s a way to dip one’s toe in one part of the pool, not to summarize the whole but to represent a recurring theme that has sparked the curiosity of the student.

As the organizer of the popular education content (the seminar leader, if you will), I was especially interested in listening to what people “got,” given the complex information presented, that they can apply to their industry and cultural practices around the whole plant. I have the advantage of having been present and paying attention not only to all of the speaker content for the day, but also our event’s “prologue” — Kevin Jodrey’s Thursday evening talk at the Vashon Grange organized by Shango Los and VIMEA. Seen this way, Kevin and Ethan provided “bookend” lectures for shorter and more collective conversations in the panels. It’s pretty clear that there are two ways of thinking about the plant around which industry evolution will happen: the cultivar and the chemovar.

Before explaining, I want to amplify the response of panelist Rick Pfrommer to a terrific question from the audience, on how to map new terms and better information into a consumer landscape that is already confused by older, less accurate information. In particular, I’m going to allow myself to use the term “strain” in this reaction piece, even though so much of our information throws the viability of the term into question. In his years as the lead wholesale buyer for Harborside Wellness Center in San Francisco, Rick is especially tuned in to the need to be understood, and he emphasized the importance of retaining familiar words in conversation with patients and other kinds of consumers.

The cultivar is the plant, the reality behind the branding that up till now has been problematically assumed to equal “strain.” It’s more than the phenotype, or physical expression of a plant’s genes from seed or clone to processed product. Kevin’s themes were about propagating and growing for terpenes, but perhaps the most eye-opening element for even the most advanced folks who heard him was the assertion that the the cannabinoid and terpene content of a plant is shaped especially by the environment in which it’s grown. This has tremendous implications not only for research on genetics and “strains,” but on the production, branding and marketing of terpene configurations. Your nutrient line matters. Your lighting matters. Your physical geography, if your plants are grown in the sun, matters considerably. A Banana OG “strain” grown in one environment can differ considerably if grown in another. It can even differ considerably if it’s fed a different nutrient line.

The cultivar is the domain of the grower. What we know about it today is what growers communicate about it. In the informal market historical context, that knowledge was highly classified and shared in secret, for obvious reasons. It was limited by the imperative to NOT record, because doing so could catch you a much bigger case, as Kevin found out in the early 2000s. As a result, it’s mostly a matter of oral history, found and lost in the memories of the growers over decades, with few exceptions. Kevin’s decades of expertise are unique in his drive to network together knowledge about cultivation of the plant especially through “strain” hunting, propagation, and crucially, functioning as a nursery from which the identification of cultivars could be matched to market opportunities across the globe.

The chemovar is the molecular composition of given cultivar. It’s the terpene profile plus the cannabinoid profile plus every element of the whole plant that is not inert, like lipids and waxes that give form but do not interact with human physiology when ingested. It’s what Dr. Russo talks about when he talks about the whole plant and how research on it evolves. The research scientist looks into the plant, literally, to engage with the consistency and variability of how people are affected by it. He needs a laboratory and lab equipment — in fact, the chemotype is the snapshot of the chemovar that analytics laboratories produce, with raw material created by the producer and processor. The chemovar is an ensemble of numbers about which considerable possibilities for branding emerge, especially in the Washington legal context where the consumer is not permitted to experience the product’s smell or effect before buying it.

The chemovar is the domain of the scientist. What we know about it today comes from an extremely small number of licensed researchers on the one hand and the databases of cannabis analytics labs, which are absolutely exploding under conditions of legalization but remain really small in comparison of what’s to come. Pioneering researchers like Dr. Russo were able to produce this knowledge under very specific and limited historical conditions.

In Ethan’s case, it was his position as Senior Medical Advisor for GW Pharmaceuticals. GW itself was created out of a perfectly legal arrangement between UK entrepreneurs, outlaw botanists with a legal cannabis genetics bank in the Netherlands, and philanthropic seed money from the late Peter Lewis, arranged by his nephew Don E. Wirtschafter, the moderator of our panels last Saturday.

The basic concepts here are not new, and this way to think about the Terpestival’s popular education elements was not planned, but the cultivar and the chemovar frame a conversation about the cannabis plant that will shape the branding evolution of the craft cannabis economy represented at the Third Annual Terpestival.

The question itself is important not just for scientific knowledge and better education, but to reconcile the marketing of cannabis with its botanical reality. The marketing of cannabis to this point has predominantly mobilized the discourse of “strains,” usually typologized as indica, sativa, and hybrid. You can see this most prominently in the ubiquitous Leafly posters hung up in most dispensaries and retail outlets in existence.

These two plant identities reflect advancement in the understanding of cannabis as a plant and as a delivery mechanism for entourage effects loosely grouped under the notion of “high” — more properly understood as a highly variable consumer experience than includes therapeutic effects rather than simply recreational drug consumption.

The frames here — from the scientist and from the grower — aren’t contradictory, but they can be confusing for an industry that is already reeling from the reconstruction of knowledge about the plant under conditions of lab testing, a vast and growing array of nutrient lines, and methods for producing cannabis. Under conditions of legalization, knowledge about the cultivar can at last be recorded and advanced considerably with knowledge about the chemovar, outside the barrier to entry posed by global cannabis prohibition. That information is going to be incredibly useful for consumers of all stripes — patients who need to know which chemotype is likely to come from which cultivar so they can get consistent and effective medicine; and adult-use consumers who need to know which chemotype is likely to come from which cultivar so they can choose what kind of experience works for them; and so on.

But it will take an industry that is paying attention to these advancements to deliver the plant itself to the people. The Third Annual Terpestival made a space for that to happen, one which I hope will grow leaps and bounds in the coming years. I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who made it possible — the popular educators, the budtenders, the sponsors, the Terpene Tournament entrants, the volunteers, the paid staff, my incredible friends and Board members, and the City that worked with us to make it possible.

 

Introducing the Terpestival Popular Education Panels

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by Dominic Corva,  Event Producer and Social Science Research Director

This year’s posts about The Original Terpestival (TM) follow the rhythm of the event’s production. First, we told you about the event. Second, we made our call for entries, explaining the political economy of the entry process — how the entry economy has a politics to it, specifically a politics of wellness. Along the way we described the value we are creating for entrants, who are provided with a vehicle for branding and marketing I 502 cannabis beyond THC and low price. We have also referred to the value created by our keynote and popular education panels, which serve to educate budtenders, consumers, retailers, policymakers and the public (in roughly that order of priority) on the science and economy of the whole plant. We also target producers and processors of course, but that demographic is significantly already educated and acting on whole plant knowledge.

Today begins a short series on the theory and practice of our keynote and education panels. I thought to write just one, but really there’s quite a bit to talk about and I want to keep these missives digestible.

I first wrote about the education work that can be done in cannabis events in August, 2014, for The Ganjier. This was barely a year after founding CASP, and inspired by the network of highly conscious cannabis events I had been pulled into over the previous few years doing research on policing and cannabis agriculture. I had been speaking at Seattle Hempfest since teaching a course on Cannabis and Society for the University of Washington’s Law, Societies and Justice Center in 2009, but once my cannabis research began in earnest I found myself participating in some key Southern Humboldt/Emerald Triangle events that combined popular education with industry evolution. These included the the last Emerald Cup before it moved to Santa Rosa and got huge, produced by Tim Blake; The Golden Tarp Awards produced by Kevin Jodrey; and also Kevin’s Spring Planting event.

What struck me was how these events successfully created spaces of intense interest from industry, to listen and learn, even with all the fun and games going on. The intent of the producers to create knowledge that was Useful coincided with the industry’s organic compulsion to seek out Necessary Knowledge, because things were changing fast. Humboldt’s watersheds were drying up, prices were crashing, and new industry players were colonizing a real estate landscape that was developed earlier by much more ecologically conscious “back to the land” and eco-anarchist groups. The Redwood Curtain was being ripped away in a process of creative destruction that could not be ignored. And it was all being catalyzed by a tectonic shift in public policy, away from punishment and eradication and towards especially environmental regulation and later, tax revenue collection.

What I learned from my journey was that if cannabis culture was to survive the policy shift to “tax and regulate,” it would require a lot of work by cannabis culture to make itself Useful and Necessary for the legal industry future. It had to create ways for new players, market participants, and consumers to do cannabis capitalism differently than commodity capitalism, which would otherwise simply destroy and replace the anti-authoritarian, ecologically conscious social movement that made it possible.

But the Washington context was, and remains, quite different from the California context, which focused on best growing and extraction processes, environmental issues, and regulatory genesis. Before I 502, our sun grown cannabis agriculture was dwarfed by its urban counterpart along the I 5 corridor. Our regulatory genesis was driven first by the politics of rights, and then later by the alcohol regulators tasked with literally replacing our decentralized, largely indoor economy, on the one hand; and imports from British Colombia (which largely ended in 2006), Oregon, and California on the other. Most significantly, our state made the choice to regulate cannabis like alcohol, rather than like cannabis.

The “like alcohol” crowd created new barriers to entry and participation that meant the new industry couldn’t take up the Whole Plant and conscious consumer politics associated with traditional cannabis culture in Washington. They took the cannabis out of the jars and sealed them into little packages with THC content on the labels, the only information besides how pretty the package was for consumers to go on; and disenfranchised medical products by alienating medical consumers through a mandatory registry and by closing down the broadly accessible system that had developed under medical cannabis. I don’t mean to reproduce moral outrage for something that has happened and isn’t going to be restored. The facts presented here explain how our industry got evolutionarily “stuck” and how our keynote and popular education efforts create Useful and Necessary Knowledge for stymied industry growth through evolution.

This meant that producers and processors didn’t have much to differentiate their product on the marketplace, on the one hand, especially through smells, samples, and sharing; and that efforts to produce medical products, including but not limited to CBD-rich products, could not be profitable enough to pursue. The game was THC monoculture, low prices, pretty packaging, and high volume.

The problem with THC monoculture isn’t simply a moral one. It severely limits the ability of producers and processors to compete in the marketplace, since they are all chasing the same market variables. And it severely limits the ability of retailers to reach a significant existing market, medical consumers; as well as to create a strong new consumer base more interested in the “wellness” aspects of cannabis consumption than how high they can get (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that). These include but are not limited to: retirees, veterans, athletes, children with epilepsy, and people who want to explore ways of dealing with pain beyond pharmaceutical medicine with often horrific side effects including addiction. The future of the legal cannabis market is much broader and highly differentiated than the I 502 present.

But it won’t be if our most knowledgable and innovative producers and processors go out of business because they can’t win the race to the bottom. Thanks in large part to the pioneering lifework our keynote speaker, Dr. Ethan Russo, they don’t have to. Producers and processors can compete in a diverse marketplace especially by highlighting the incredibly diverse ways that terpenes and terpene profiles deliver cannabinoids to many, many different endocannabinoid systems — many of which are not made well by THC. While the Terpene Tournament (TM) showcases industry evolution, our keynote and panel speakers provide the scientific, technical, and expert information necessary to stimulate market growth and consumer preference for diversity.

There are three panels, two of which are annual in the sense that they address ongoing topics associated with a popular education focus: branding cannabis with the politics of wellness, by populating and popularizing the value of terpenes in the production of the “entourage effect” coined by our keynote speaker, Dr. Ethan Russo. This stands in contrast to a monocultural focus on the cash value of lab-reported THC, which we see as the cultural foundation of the current regulated market.

Let’s take a look at the panels and then follow up in the coming days with a post that more thoroughly introduces our speakers and their specific topics.

Our Industry Evolution panel addresses constituent parts of industry so that they may prosper by valuing wellness. The purpose of this panel is to catalyze the evolution of Washington’s legal cannabis industry by featuring the Subject Matter Experts with deep historical and ongoing perspectives not readily available in Washington State. Our speakers are Kevin Jodrey of Wonderland Nursery and the Ganjier; Rick Pfrommer of Pfrommer Consulting, former lead buyer for Harborside Health Center; Aaron Stancyk of our lab sponsor Medicine Creek Analytics; and our Terpene Tournament (TM) Judges’ Coordinator, Alison Draisin of Ettalew’s Medibles.

Our “Current Topics” panel will change each year. This year’s addresses an emergent industry phenomenon, the market for Cannabis-derived and other Terpenes. The purpose of this panel is to educate industry and the public on different perspectives and techniques emerging as industry “takes on” terpenes to create and market products. Our speakers are Ben Cassiday of True Terpenes, Kate Quackenbush of I 502 processor Fractal, , Pam Haley of Aromatherapy Consulting and I 502 producer/processor Pam’s Plants; and Jeremy Plumb of Farma, The Cultivation Classic, and the Open Cannabis Project.

And of course, our Terpenes and Wellness panel addresses the science and practice of cannabis-facilitated wellness. The purpose of this panel is to hear from medical experts how terpenes are used in the clinical setting.  Retention of the terpene fraction may influence the overall effect of the product used. Examples from patient will be presented. The speakers on this panel are: Dr. Michelle Sexton, co-founder and Medical Science Research Director for the Center for the Study of Cannabis and Social Policy; Seattle pediatric physician Dr. Hatha Gbedawo, and keynote speaker Dr. Ethan Russo.

The information provided by our subject matter experts create strong roots for another foundation to be possible: wellness. We understand wellness in terms of an ecology in balance, a condition of physical well-being that is reproduced by the health of the social system in which our bodies are embedded. Stay tuned for a more in-depth introduction to our speakers in the coming days!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spicer’s Press Statements on Legal Cannabis: Don’t Panic

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by Dominic Corva, Social Science Research Director

Yesterday’s White House press conference comments about the Trump Administration’s approach to legal cannabis sent the cannabis press into a frenzy of fear, anger, and a little hysteria. A superficial reading of Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s comments signaled the first clearly negative tone about Department of Justice (DOJ) enforcement against State-legal cannabis/marijuana experiments, but let’s take a closer look at what he actually said and add some context to defuse some of the hysteria about a “crackdown” while pointing towards what it actually might mean.

The first thing to notice is that Spicer said nothing about enforcement against State legal cannabis based on Federal conflict. Rather, Spicer echoed Jeff Sessions’ earlier comments about whether the 2014 Cole memo itself was being enforced, and consistently referenced existing policy structures at the federal level. Further, the question he was responding to was from an Arkansas reporter concerned about Arkansas’ recent medical cannabis legislation. It’s clear this response was meant to reassure Arkansas, which is why Spicer really didn’t say much new about recreational cannabis.

He begins by making a distinction between medical and recreational cannabis, highlighting a general Administrative perspective that not only favors medical cannabis in principle, but respects the existing Congressional appropriations rider that forbids DOJ enforcement against medical cannabis businesses that are compliant with State law. The link I provide here not only describes the legislative directive, but reports on the Court victory that gives it more legs than just a directive. This means the DOJ has already lost an effort in the judicial branch to overturn it. The DOJ doesn’t like losing money and court battles, so we can read this as doubly-armored protection for existing Federal medical cannabis policy.

Arkansas, Spicer is saying, is safe to proceed with constructing a medical cannabis regime. A second reporter jumps on the distinction he made, which was meant to highlight how Arkansas medical cannabis isn’t in danger, between recreational and medical cannabis. And he punts it to the DOJ.

At 2:35: “that’s a question for the Department of Justice, I do believe that you’ll see greater enforcement of it.”

The question is, what does he mean by “it”? In all likelihood, he means what Jeff Sessions clearly meant in his confirmation hearings when he discussed the Cole memo.

This is what he said: “”I think some of them are truly valuable in evaluating cases,” Sessions said Tuesday about the [Cole] guidelines. ‘But fundamentally, the criticism I think that was legitimate is that they may not have been followed. And using good judgment about how to handle these cases will be a responsibility of mine.””

The Cole memo guides DOJ enforcement policy, not against legal cannabis, but against legal cannabis diversion to other states, to minors, to double-dipping (using legal cannabis businesses as a cover for State-illegal market operations), drugged driving, and so forth. This means that the Feds reserve the right to enforce against legal cannabis businesses where State enforcement is deemed insufficient.

This is extremely different from “cracking down on legal cannabis.” My reading concludes that the Feds reserve the right here to supplement State enforcement of their own legal cannabis businesses that are not in fact compliant with State law.

The caveat here is that this is probably a much, much larger portion of the legal cannabis market than States would admit. Oregon cannabis organizer John Sajo has distinguished between “tightly regulated” and “tightly controlled” cannabis markets. The former is basically political theater, in which seed-to-sale tracking systems are effective because they exist, rather than because they work very well. Why they wouldn’t work very well isn’t hard to see from inside a legal cannabis business, but no one — especially not State regulatory agencies — has any stake in advertising the fact that there are simply not enough human resources to comb through thousands of hours of surveillance data before they can be destroyed in a 30-day window, for example.

“Tightly regulated” should be seen for the political theater that it is, reassuring key worriers (the Feds, State governors, legislators, the anti-cannabis culture that remains dominant even in legal cannabis states) that there’s nothing to see here because we are compliant with the Cole Memo. “Tightly controlled” is a prohibition fantasy, as it always has been especially with respect to a plant.

The take here is that Spicer, via Sessions, has indicated that the DOJ will do some enforcement of the Cole memo, against market participants not State systems, not that the DOJ will “crack down on” legal cannabis regimes wherever they might be. I would hazard to guess that Cole memo enforcement is probably more likely in Colorado, rather than Washington and certainly nowhere there isn’t even a legal system in place yet. It takes at least 2 years from initiative passage to market and oversight functionality, so Oregon is kind of the next closest in terms of viable enforcement logic, and they have recently passed the stage where Spicer’s comments would be particularly relevant (ie, when unregulated adult purchases were permitted at licensed medical stores).

Nothing in the press conference indicated that the Feds were coming after public officials or attempting to stop legal cannabis implementation in say California. This didn’t stop California and Washington from “signaling” right back, just in case. It should be noted that both of these States have been making political hay out of refusing to cooperate with Federal immigration enforcement under the Trump administration, too.

The Trump administration, if it is consistent with anything, is consistently nationalist. Which means most of its political enforcement theater will be directed at issues that can be attributed to things that come from somewhere else, such as the greatly exaggerated supply of cannabis from transnational criminal organizations aka “Mexican cartels.”

Then there’s the matter of resources for a “crackdown,” which would be politically difficult. Trump’s DOJ is extremely busy doing other things that will undoubtedly take a toll on their prosecution budget as well as test the limits of the public’s tolerance of Executive freestyling. It’s an open question whether his base would support much DOJ activity that would run counter to state’s rights issues that don’t directly implicate cross-border trade and migration.

Cannabis politics are pretty diverse and often right-wing — there’s nothing inherently progressive about schemes to tax and regulate something that is consumed like a commodity by so many. After four years of ethnographic immersion, it seems to me that Whole Plant, Whole Society politics remain limited to legacy farmers, cannabis culturalists, and medical patients — none of whom are served very well by cannabis legalization.

From this perspective, the hysteria over Spicer’s comments yesterday is particularly flavored by commodity cannabis interests, on the one hand, and anti-Trump State politics on the other. Those who’ve been involved with cannabis policy longer than say two years aren’t particularly fazed by what the Feds do or what the States say, primarily because we recognize how this is not so much something new as an organic evolution of Prohibition culture and democratic authoritarianism at large.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oregon’s Cannabis Regulatory Landscape

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by John Sajo, Oregon cannabis agriculturalist and decades-long organizer

I hope the democratic leaders of the Oregon Joint Committee on Marijuana Regulation wake up and take a new approach. They have been thinking that merging medical and recreational marijuana will create a “simpler” system because we won’t have two state agencies doing the same thing. The problem with that is federal marijuana prohibition, which distinguishes medical marijuana from recreational marijuana.

Having the OLCC take over medical marijuana is a terrible idea. Frankly the whole idea of seed to sale tracking and regulating marijuana like plutonium is suspect. It is based on the very questionable idea that the way avoid a federal crackdown on Oregon’s legal marijuana system is to comply with the Cole memo – the Obama administration document that outlines federal tolerance. First, who really thinks the Trump administration wants to follow Obama administration guidance? Second, the entire seed to sale tracking is a fraud as far as preventing diversion to the black market.

We still don’t really know what the feds will do about states with legal marijuana but the centralized over regulated system Oregon has created is extremely fragile when it comes to resisting the feds. Here are some suggestions for how to defend the will of Oregon voters to legalize against possible federal action:

1) Keep medical separate. This makes sense regardless because patients’ needs are getting lost in the rush for profits and taxes in the rec market. Medical marijuana is legal federally. Congress continues to pass bills that forbid the Justice Department from spending any money going after state legal medical marijuana.

2) Don’t create a centralized system. It is much easier to crack down on. Having the marijuana supply come from a few hundred OLCC farms instead of tens of thousands of medical marijuana gardens is much more vulnerable to fed raids. There is no reason for Oregon to provide a list of all marijuana producers to the feds.

3) Base our system of taxing and regulating marijuana on allowing the free citizens of Oregon to do what they want with marijuana. Stop regulating where no problems exist! Allow any Oregonian to sell marijuana either to stores or to other citizens however they choose. Adults growing four plants will often have excess over their needs and if we don’t allow it to be sold legally, it will by definition be sold illegally. Marijuana sold in stores can still be tested but tracking individual marijuana plants by law is a boondoggle that only makes farmers more vulnerable to feds.

4) Require any individual selling marijuana to report the total sales to the Oregon Department of Revenue and pay the 17% tax.

5) Allow adults to use marijuana socially in public places where everyone voluntarily chooses to be in the presence of marijuana smoke or other usage. Taxing this lightly will dramatically increase the amount of revenue the state collects.

These suggestions will create a multifaceted system. OLCC stores will do fine, as long as feds leave them alone. Medical dispensaries will be more protected because of the Congressional sidebars on federal medical marijuana enforcement. Individuals selling marijuana outside of regulated stores are the most immune from federal action. The feds will never have the resources to stop this activity which will occur regardless and has been unstoppable by prohibition for a century.

A system of marijuana regulation based on personal freedom will be the most successful. Entrepreneurs can focus on their dreams, not on ever changing regulations. Much more revenue will be generated. People will be willing to pay more tax if they are not oppressed by mind numbing regulations. And the whole system will be more protected against anything the feds can do.

Freedom still can work!