Mark Kleiman repeats his longtime favorite proposal for decriminalizing pot:
Substantively, I’m not a big fan of legalization on the alcohol model; a legal pot industry, like the legal booze and gambling industries, would depend for the bulk of its sales on excessive use, which would provide a strong incentive for the marketing effort to aim at creating and maintaining addiction….
So I continue to favor a “grow your own” policy, under which it would be legal to grow, possess, and use cannabis and to give it away, but illegal to sell it. Of course there would be sales, and law enforcement agencies would properly mostly ignore those sales. But there wouldn’t be billboards.
I get his point: decriminalizing marijuana is one thing, but do we really want the Philip Morris marketing machine working overtime to produce endless PR campaigns allegedly aimed at adults but in reality doing nothing of the kind? Probably not.
But I wonder if there’s some middle ground here? I’m always dubious of proposals that rely on law enforcement to “mostly ignore” technical violations of a law, since that’s an open invitation for them to abuse their discretion. So I’d prefer to legalize commercial operations. But practically speaking, is there some way to open up commercial cannabis sales but limit their operations to a fairly small size? It seems like there ought to be, and it would certainly be a boon to those of us without green thumbs. Ideas?
UPDATE: Another objection here.
