Baker Institute Viewpoints is a regular blog series that presents an array of views on a single issue. In this installment, five Baker Institute fellows and two guest experts will consider whether the United States should legalize marijuana. Each weekday from Sept. 17- Sept. 25, one of the seven writers — whose backgrounds include a biography of evangelist Billy Graham and a 30-year career in the Drug Enforcement Administration — will give his or her take on the issue. Today, Tony Payan, visiting Baker Institute Scholar for Immigration and Border Studies, writes that “no one should get excited about the prospect of marijuana legalization anytime soon” because the debate has only just begun.
The question of whether marijuana should be legalized is both easy and difficult to answer. It is easy to say yes, at one level, for several reasons. First, by the three most important measures of drug control success, we can say that marijuana control policies have failed: Marijuana is still widely available. It is cheaper than ever before. And thanks to genetic engineering technology, it is much more potent than in the past.
Second, its cultivation has spread to areas that range from the high mountains in Mexico to national parks in the United States to
hydroponic gardens in the United States and Canadian suburbs. Its growth is now ubiquitous.
Third, there seems to be no relationship between the ups-and-downs in marijuana use and the steady increases in funding for illegal drug control enforcement.
Fourth, Americans are organizing at the local and state level to resist federal prohibitionist marijuana laws, complicating enforcement of marijuana laws. In this regard, there is something to be said for defederalizing marijuana laws and allowing the states to try different policies until a reasonable public policy emerges over time and marijuana control can be federalized again with that experience. The states, after all, have been the perfect laboratories for many an American public policy before the federal government unified it under nationwide mandates.
Fifth, there is broad agreement that marijuana provides the bulk of resources for traffickers and dealers; legalizing it would deny them an important source of income.
Finally, legalization of marijuana would allow us to refocus
law enforcement resources on other drugs, such as cocaine and heroin, perhaps with greater success.
However, simply saying yes — even if there are powerful reasons to do so — does not make the decision easy given other uncertain issues that must be part of the debate. For instance, how much control should the state and federal governments have? What should prevention and treatment efforts look like at the federal and state levels, assuming that the goal is still consumption reduction and marijuana laws will remain an issue within the realm of cooperative federalism? What to do with the thousands or hundreds of thousands of individuals who are currently serving sentences related to a substance that has suddenly become legal? Should they receive some kind of amnesty or be retried? Would legalizing marijuana make producers who are currently underground suddenly come to the light and become legitimate farmers? Would marijuana be a product that could be imported, say, from Mexico, or even exported? What agency would oversee marijuana regulatory efforts? Who would tax it, at what level, and where would the revenue go? What is the ideal taxation level? Would an underground marijuana market continue, particularly if taxes are too high and incentivize the underground (non-taxed) production of marijuana? What are the implications for other drugs, such as cocaine and confection drugs, after marijuana is legalized?
The debate on whether marijuana should be legalized or not has not even begun. The parties to the debate — the government with its apprehensive politicians and deeply vested law enforcement apparatus, on the one hand, and marijuana legalization advocates, on the other —are far apart and the political environment is not conducive to a dialogue. The issues are thorny and quite complicated. Hence, no one should get excited about the prospect of marijuana legalization anytime soon, but the national debate is slowly shifting, with 17 states and the District of Columbia having passed medical marijuana laws. The time to sit down to answer the questions posed here — and others — may not be that far in the future.
Read the previous posts in this series:
- “Marijuana: A case for legalization,” by William Martin, director of the Baker Institute Drug Policy Program.
- “In a contest with alcohol and tobacco, marijuana wins,” by guest writer Sylvia Longmire, an author and expert on Mexico’s drug wars.
- “Legalization of marijuana: When, not if,” by Baker Institute nonresident drug fellow Gary Hale, former chief of intelligence in the Houston Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
- “Regulations work: Lessons from California’s experience with medical marijuana,” by guest writer Tom Heddleston, Ph.D., whose dissertation examined the formation and development of the medical marijuana movement in California.
Tony Payan is the visiting Baker Institute Scholar for Immigration Studies
Richard Flor died in a Las Vegas Bureau of Prisons medical facility on Wednesday.
