State’s gray zone between good intentions, reality
California is stuck in the gray zone.
“Gray zone” is a military term for the space between peace and war, a time and place that provides opportunities for the wellarmed while posing dangers for citizens caught in the middle.
In California today, I think the phrase explains the perilous condition of our communities as the state pursues major changes in how we regulate drugs, respond to homelessness and sentence criminals.
California voters have righteously demanded major transitions that move people out of the darkness of illegal drug sales, sleeping on the street and lives stalled by criminal records — and into the light of legal cannabis businesses, permanent housing and second chances for excons.
But as California governments struggle to complete these transitions, too many people get caught in the gray zone between illegal and legal.
Why are these transitions so challenging? Because they pose a paradox. When you pull people across a societal dividing line, you can’t simply erase the line. You must maintain enough of a border to keep those you wish to aid from going back.
This paradox is seen clearly in California’s faltering shift to legal cannabis. For years, the state tolerated a growing multibillion- dollar black market for recreational cannabis.
So, the 2016 vote to legalize recreational cannabis posed a conundrum, with our governments forced to accomplish two seemingly contradictory feats. First, they had to build a new regulatory regime for a new legal market. But second, to pressure black market participants to move into that legal market, they had to enforce laws against cannabis that they had ignored in the past.
So far, California has failed to meet either challenge. Many communities have refused to develop a welcoming structure for legal cannabis — and refused to enforce laws against black market operators.
These twin failures have landed many cannabis businesses in a gray zone between the illegal and legal markets. Those who want to start new legal businesses are discouraged. And black marketeers take just enough steps to appear semi-legal, without joining the legal market. According to one analysis, our cannabis gray market had $5.5 billion in revenues last year — compared to the legal market’s $3.7 billion.
A similar dynamic is developing in homeless policy. State and local governments have sought to decriminalize homelessness and push people into housing first before helping them with other problems.
But the housing-first transition is too slow. Building housing is so costly that we don’t have the homeless housing we need. The results: more visible homelessness and rising frustration from Californians who voted for billions in homeless housing.
A comparable paradox dogs the state’s transition away from mass incarceration. In this decade, Californians have approved two ballot measures. Proposition 47 reduced penalties for nonviolent crimes and allowed felons to have prior crimes reclassified as misdemeanors to make it easier to get jobs and benefits. Proposition 57 allowed for parole for nonviolent offenders.
But the state has been timid about funding programs to help felons reenter the legal economy and rebuild their lives. As a result, too many California are now stuck in a gray zone — no longer in prison, but unable to make a transition into legitimate economic life. A Public Policy Institute of California study found a potential connection between Prop. 47 and an increase in larceny and thefts across the state.
Californians desperately need to look at these gray zones — and then look in the mirror. We’ve grown too comfortable in the gray zones.
We can’t just declare grand new transitions in social policy at the ballot box. We must spend the money and enforce the laws necessary to complete what we promised. Otherwise, our halffinished plans are only disrupting the lives of less fortunate Californians.
The biggest gray zone in California now is the space between our good intentions — and our realities.