Election Day could expand the map for where pot is legal
Proponents for recreational pot use say a yes vote in California may challenge federal ban on the drug
TO the red-and-blue map of U.S. politics, it may be time to add green. The movement to legalize marijuana, the country’s most popular illicit drug, will take a giant leap on Election Day if California and four other states vote to allow recreational cannabis, as polls suggest they may.
The map of where pot is legal could include the entire West Coast and a string of states from the Pacific Ocean to Colorado, raising a stronger challenge to the federal government’s ban on the drug.
In addition to California, Massachusetts and Maine both have legalization initiatives on the ballot next month that seem likely to pass. Arizona and Nevada are also voting on recreational marijuana, with polls showing Nevada voters evenly split.
The passage of recreational marijuana laws in Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington over the past four years may have unlocked the door toward eventual federal legalization. But a yes vote in California, which has an economy the size of a large industrial country’s, could blow the door open, experts say.
“If we’re successful, it’s the beginning of the end of the war on marijuana,” said Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California and a former mayor of San Francisco. “If California moves, it will put more pressure on Mexico and Latin America writ large to reignite a debate on legalization there.”
Legalization puts pot-legal states in direct conflict with the federal government, particularly the Drug Enforcement Administration, which in August defied calls for a softening of regulations on marijuana and reaffirmed its classification as a Schedule 1 drug, the same category as heroin.
Legalization also reinforces a jarring dysfunction between state and federal legal systems over how to handle financial transactions related to marijuana. The federal government, which in 2013 announced it would not prosecute states for legalizing marijuana under certain conditions, accepts taxes from marijuana companies. But the same companies have trouble opening bank accounts or accepting credit cards because of the federal marijuana ban.
The market for both recreational and medicinal marijuana is projected to grow to $22 billion in four years from $7 billion this year if California says yes, according to projections by the Arcview Group, a company that links investors with cannabis companies.
“This is the vote heard ’round the world,” said Arcview’s chief executive, Troy Dayton. “What we’ve seen before has been tiny compared to what we are going to see in California.”
And yet scholars who have studied these legalization measures say that to a large extent they are very much a shot in the dark, a vast public health experiment that could involve states that hold 23 percent of the U.S. population — and generate a quarter of the country’s economic output — carried out with relatively little scientific research on the risks. In addition, there are 25 states that already permit medical marijuana.
To hear proponents of legalization in California tell it, a yes vote here would allow the same benefits seen in Colorado — a sharp reduction in drug arrests and a large increase in tax collection — but on a scale many times larger.
Legalization would also further transform parts of the California countryside into pot-growing farms, and it would legitimize and perhaps help consolidate an industry that, once out of the shadows, will likely have the same lobbying power as tobacco and alcohol companies.
According to Marijuana Business Daily, a trade publication, the recreational marijuana industry would be larger than the wine industry if use was legalized nationwide.
The enthusiasm for pot legalization — 57 percent of Americans believe it should be legal — has spurred experts to push back against what they say is a widespread public perception that marijuana is a mild drug and less harmful than tobacco or alcohol.
Jennifer Tejada, chairwoman of the law and legislative committee of the California Police Chiefs Association, said she is not against legalization but argues that the measure is ill thought out.
California should first develop laws to determine when a marijuana user is too impaired to drive, she said.
“It’s like putting a 12-year-old behind the wheel of a car and saying, ‘Go for a drive! Let’s study the safety issues later,’ ” she said. “It’s ludicrous.”
“We are teaching our kids more and more that living in an altered state is
a societal norm,” said Scott Chipman, the Southern California chairman of Citizens Against Legalizing Marijuana, which is campaigning to persuade voters against passage of the measure. “This is not about a war on drugs — it’s a battle to protect the human brain, the mind, our futures, our kids.”
Proponents cite the tens of thousands of marijuana arrests in recent years as a powerful reason for legalization. But Tejada said the police in California no longer make arrests for possession or use of small amounts.
“Go to any county jail and find someone who is in there for possession of marijuana,” she said. “It hasn’t happened for two decades.”
Stanton Glantz, a professor at the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, says marijuana regulations, which were formulated like laws for alcohol, should instead be modeled after the measures passed in recent decades that discourage tobacco use. Cigarette smoke and marijuana smoke have similar harmful chemical profiles, he said.
The ballot initiatives in California and elsewhere are written “in a way to maximize business potential without seriously considering the public health impact,” Glantz said. Legalization lowers arrests, but “this is exchanging a criminal justice crisis for a public health crisis,” he said.
A number of recent studies, while acknowledging the limits of research under the federal ban, warn that marijuana’s harmful effects — especially on adolescent development, to the cardiovascular system and to fetuses — have been understated.
A study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found that marijuana was more addictive than alcohol but less so than tobacco. “The addictiveness of cannabis has been underestimated,” said Jesse Cougle, lead author. The finding “definitely contradicts a lot of opinions on the topic,” he said. Among weekly users, the study found a 25 percent risk of dependence for marijuana compared with 16 percent for alcohol and 67 percent for tobacco.
Proponents of legalization play down the potential dangers of marijuana, saying generations of Americans have used it in what they describe as a type of real-time experiment for harmful effects. “People die from alcohol every day,” said Adam Bierman, the co-founder and chief executive of MedMen, a cannabis investment firm. “People don’t die from marijuana.”
Data from Colorado, still incomplete, provides a picture of what might be in store for California and other states. A report by the Colorado Department of Public Safety found both a 46 percent drop in the number of marijuana arrests in 2014, the first year commercial marijuana was available, and a rise in marijuana use among young people. It also highlighted a “significant increase” in overall rates of emergency room visits from 739 per 100,000 in the three-year period before legalization to 956 per 100,000 in the first year and a half of legalization.
Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California, concedes that legalizing marijuana has many challenges, among them staving off the prospect of powerful marijuana monopolies and keeping what he termed a “dangerous drug” out of the hands of children.
“It’s on us to prove we can do this responsibly,” he said. “I grant that there are those who don’t believe we are up to it. We have to prove them wrong.”