The W.o.D, New World
The W.o.D, The Little Three
The W.o.D Users and Addiction
To the extent that we in Colorado think about legal marijuana, now that the initial excitement has worn off, we have a smug sense that we have taken the lead in doing something smart. We are as divided as any place over immigrants, guns, and climate change, but our police don’t waste their time chasing down pot smokers anymore.
Adults don’t have to worry, as they used to, about neighbours smelling reefer smoke wafting from their patios. Even if marijuana tax revenues — which are slated to help public schools — aren’t what we’d hoped, our state is making money from something that used to cost it money. Marijuana is no big deal.
We look at other states that treat it as a public menace and wonder what in the world they’re thinking. Nobody I spoke with in the United States or elsewhere envisioned stores selling heroin, cocaine, or methamphetamine as freely as Colorado stores sell marijuana or as state liquor stores sell vodka.
The way most researchers imagine hard-drug distribution, short of a state monopoly, involves some kind of supervision. A network of counsellors — not necessarily physicians — would monitor how a drug fits into a person’s life. When Kleiman, at NYU, allows himself to imagine legal cocaine, he pictures users setting their own dose.
“You can decide whether you want to raise your quota — a bureaucratic process — or see someone about your cocaine problem. This is to give your long-term self a fighting chance against your short-term self.”
Eric Sterling, the executive director of the anti-prohibition Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, envisions a similar system. “Someone might say, ‘I want cocaine because it stimulates me in my creative work,’ or, ‘I want cocaine to improve my orgasms.’
The response might be, ‘Why don’t you have enough energy? Do you exercise?’ Or, ‘What might be interfering with the current quality of your sex life?’ ”
Those who want to try LSD or other psychedelics, Sterling suggests, might go to licensed “trip leaders,” analogous to wilderness guides — people trained, indemnified, and insured to take the uninitiated into potentially dangerous territory. Of course, it’s easy to imagine people who enjoy cocaine, heroin, or psychedelics saying, “to hell with all that” and continuing to buy on the black market.
But, as Sterling points out, doing so is risky. If someone as rich and well-connected as Philip Seymour Hoffman can die from a heroin shot, nobody is safe. Also, as Sterling notes, “It’s a hassle to be an addict. Find a dealer, score, find a place to get off ”
If a lawful, regulated system is fine-tuned — so that drugs are cheap and trustworthy, the process is not too burdensome, and the taxes on them are not too high — users will likely come to prefer it to the black market. Competition, not violence, will destroy the criminal gangs that control illegal drug distribution.
“Ultimately this is all about building the proper cultural context for using drugs,” Sterling says, a context in which “the exaggerations and the falsehoods get extinguished.” In 2009, Britain’s Transform Drug Policy Foundation put out a 232-page report called “After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation.”
The authors suggested issuing licenses for buying and using drugs, with sanctions for those who screw up much like gun licenses in some U.S. states, or driver’s licenses. Users would have their purchases tracked by computer, so rising use would, in theory, be noticed, making intervention possible.
Legal vendors would bear partial responsibility for “socially destructive incidents” the way bartenders can be held responsible for serving an obvious drunk who later has an accident behind the wheel.
For pricing, the report suggests prices high enough to “discourage misuse, and sufficiently low to ensure that under-cutting. is not profitable for illicit drug suppliers.” And although the British group argued for a generally more laissez-faire market than European and Canadian government-run heroin-distribution systems, it embraced a complete ban on any kind of advertising and marketing, and argued instead for plain, pharmaceutical style packaging.
Space Odyssey
Legalization seemed a sensible political and economic measure, and a way to distinguish Colorado as a progressive beacon of the West. But one night in July, I was headed for the Cruiser Ride, Boulder’s goofy, costumed weekly bicycle parade, and I thought it might be fun to try it stoned.
It was a lightbulb-over-the-head moment. A year ago, I wouldn’t have known where to find a joint. Now, I simply pedalled to the Green Room, a marijuana retail store a mile from my house.
Although I wear every one of my fifty-nine years on my face, I was carded — in a reception room decorated with portraits of Jerry Garcia and Jimi Hendrix.
A bud tender escorted me into the store, where I stood at a counter, separated from the customer next to me by a discreet, bank-teller-like divider. I picked up a card titled edibles education: start low, go slow and read that if I bought any of the pot-laced artisanal goodies,
I should not consume them with alcohol; I should keep them out of the reach of children; I should start with a single small serving and wait two hours before taking more.
“Everybody’s metabolism is different,” it said. For a new consumer, no more than one to five milligrams of cannabis was recommended; the potency of the buttery candies and cookies was listed on the labels. This was a far cry from the fibrous, foul-tasting pot brownies I used to eat before late-night college screenings of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
A young bud tender — tattooed and achingly professional — presided over a copious array of marijuana blossoms in large glass apothecary jars. I confess I got a little lost as he discoursed, with Talmudic subtlety, on the differences between Grape Ape, Stardew, and Bubba Kush.
The joint that I bought for $10 — fat, expertly rolled, and with a little paper filter — came in a green plastic tube with a police-badge-shaped sticker reading department of revenue, marijuana. For someone who started buying pot in alleys when Gerald Ford was president, this felt like Elysium.
I wasn’t allowed to light up in the store or outside on the street; I had to go home to smoke legally. As instructed, I started low and went slow, taking only one hit.
Twenty minutes later, I was stoned in that good way I remembered: I felt perceptive and amused, with none of the sluggishness or paranoia common to the old fifteen-dollar ounces.
That single joint I bought is so strong that even though I’ve taken hits from it half a dozen times since my Cruiser Ride, I still have about a third left, a treat to keep around for the right occasion.
So, under legalization I have become a pot smoker again. But I don’t drive stoned or need treatment, so who cares? I drink a beer or a dram of Laphroaig most days too, and I still hit my deadline for this article.
If it is now time to start thinking creatively about legalization, we’d be wise to remember that, like carefully laid military plans, detailed drug-liberalization strategies probably won’t survive their first contact with reality.
“People are thinking about the utopian endgame, but the transition will be unpredictable,” says Sterling, of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation.
“Whatever system of regulation gets set up, there will be people who exploit the edges. But that’s true for speeding, for alcohol, for guns.” Without a state-run monopoly, there will be more than one type of legal, regulated drug market, he says, and the markets won’t solve every conceivable problem.
“Nobody thinks our alcohol system is a complete failure because there are after-hours sales, or because people occasionally buy alcohol for minors.”
#Legalizing, and then regulating, drug markets will likely be messy, at least in the short term. Still, in a technocratic, capitalist, and fundamentally free society like the United States, education, counselling, treatment, distribution, regulation, pricing, and taxation all seem to better fit our national skill set than the suppression of immense black markets and the violence and corruption that come with it.
