My thoughts on Proposition 19
October in California is the start of two seasons: the rainy season and the proposition season. The first is a result of Mother Nature. The second is a result of our penchant to want to vote on everything. I happen to think both are pretty much all wet, but that's another story.
At the top of the ballot this year will be Proposition 19, which would change California law to more-or-less make marijuana legal in the state. With most propositions, my decision how to vote is a fairly easy one. This one, I must admit, is hard.
Marijuana is an intoxicant, and as such needs some kind of regulation to mitigate the harms that intoxicants can do if not used carefully. The current model of regulation for marijuana is prohibition (we don't think of prohibition as a type of "regulation", but it is). Prohibition as a model of regulation isn't necessarily a bad thing, depending on the severity of what you're regulating and how successful the prohibition is: there's not too much argument with "thou shalt not kill". Prohibition starts to run into trouble, though, when it's not completely successful, since it is pretty much an all-or-nothing strategy: by inherently precluding any milder forms of regulation, when it fails, it fails utterly. This isn't unique to prohibition of drugs ... how many teen pregnancies have been caused by an attitude of, "My child doesn't need to be taught about condoms because I'm sure he/she will abstain altogether"? Marvelous if it works ... unnecessarily damaging if it doesn't work perfectly.
Surveys show that somewhere between 7% and 10% of adult Californians smoke pot at least once a year. At that level of usage, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that a prohibition-based model of regulation is not working very well ... the damages from actually enforcing the law and subjecting one person in ten to legal action would far exceed whatever benefits might come from the reduction in pot usage. As with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, I think marijuana prohibition has crossed the line of "you can't arrest everybody". Also, prohibition works best when the consequences of a regulatory failure are quite severe; however, there is no evidence that having one Californian in ten as an occasional pot smoker is threatening civilisation ... or really causing any obvious damage at all. As such, I think it's time to explore and to experiment with other models of regulation.
Which is a long-winded way to say that I support legal weed.
When a bill was introduced in the state legislature earlier this year to make marijuana legal in this state and to regulate it in pretty much the same manner as alcohol (you have to be 21 to use it, you can't use it in public, etc.), I supported it: overblown fairy tales of "reefer madness" aside, marijuana and alcohol are similar enough in their effects that this seemed a good place to start the experiment. Of course, legislatures aren't very good at doing controversial things, even if they may be beneficial (politicians naturally want to get re-elected), so it went nowhere. This is how we got to Plan B: amateur legislation drafted by a marijuana advocate that has ended up on the ballot.
I have two core problems with Proposition 19. The first is that it has the potential to be seriously counterproductive to the cause that it purports to promote. No matter what California does with its law, marijuana will still be illegal under federal law, which trumps state law. California's laws on marijuana, to the extent that they conflict with federal law, matter only in so far as the Drug Enforcement Administration allows them to matter. California's existing medical marijuana setup was initially prosecuted by the Feds, and there are "pot clubs" in California today only because the DEA decided that they had bigger fish to fry in the "war on drugs". Supporters of Proposition 19 make the assumption that that largesse will continue, especially since the Administration have now said explicitly that they do not intend to focus on marijuana sales that meet state standards. But let's suppose that Proposition 19 does pass. And let's suppose that the mid-term elections return a Republican-majority Congress that might be inclined to give the DEA some extra money actually to go after those Californian scofflaws ...
Passing Proposition 19 could end up making marijuana in California more restricted than it is now, not less ... so much for voting for "legalisation". Even if perhaps enforcement actions by the DEA aren't stepped up, Congress also has the power of the purse. If California legalises weed, it could easily be said that California is no longer meeting Federal public health standards, which could jeopardise billions of dollars that California receives from the Feds for programs like MediCal. Every state in the United States has a blood alcohol limit for driving a car of 0.08% not because of explicit Federal law, but because the Feds won't give any highway money to a state that sets its limit higher. Nothing prevents Congress from cutting off Federal highway funds to a state that legalises pot, either, on pretty much the same grounds.
Had the state legislature passed its bill and then the Federal government threatened anything like this as a result of failure to follow Federal law, the state legislature could fairly easily reverse itself. However, this is an initiative. If it has adverse consequences, the only thing that can reverse it is another vote of the people, which requires much more time and is much less flexible. Similarly, legalising marijuana is an experiment. It would be valuable to have the law be as flexible as possible so that it can be amended over time to suit the results of the experiment. An initiative is not a particularly good way to do that.
The other core problem that I have with Proposition 19 is that it does not create a uniform statewide standard. The proposition allows individual counties and cities to decide what regulations they want to impose on weed, what taxes they will collect, and so on. I suspect the authors of the proposition were hoping to get a few more "yes" votes out of the more conservative parts of the state by suggesting that the proposition could pass without local consequence: just have your county continue to ban weed. Sorry to say, but those folks were going to vote "no" anyway on general principles. What Prop 19 will do is create a crazy-quilt of "wet" and "dry" counties and cities that will make it difficult for people to know where they stand and that will drive county and city elected officials nuts trying to decide what they want to do in the face of intense local voter passion (not to mention, expect a flood of local ballot measures). Imagine how difficult it would be to park your car if a red kerb meant "don't park here" in San Jose but "it's OK for red cars to park here" in Fremont and "20 minute parking" in Santa Clara. That's what Prop 19 would do. I don't want to have to worry about going to a pot club in Mountain View and buying some legal-in-Mountain-View weed, and then getting busted on the drive home by Sunnyvale PD because I bought 5 grams of weed and Sunnyvale's legal limit is 2 grams ... or zero.
We have statewide standards for alcohol. We have statewide standards for tobacco. If we want marijuana to be legal, we should have statewide standards for it as well.
So you're thinking I'm voting no. Here are the two reasons why I'm not sure about that.
The first is that voting is a completely up-or-down thing: there is no subtlety about it. I do support legal, regulated marijuana. I would like to vote, "Yes, but I don't think Prop 19 is the way to do it" ... but I can't do that. A statewide "no" vote on Prop 19 would put a severe damper on future attempts to legalise weed in a way that I would support, because it would send the message that "Californians don't want marijuana to be legal". Given the controversial nature of the idea, I can't see the legislature proposing any more bills, for example, if a majority of voters reject Prop 19 ... even if perhaps a fair number of those voters were like me and said no only to this specific implementation of the idea but say yes to the idea itself.
The second is that a "no" vote is a vote that, at least on the surface, is against my own interests, and one that exposes me to reasonable accusations of hypocrisy. I try not to be a hypocrite. No matter how sensible and rational my reasons for voting no, in my gut I will certainly feel like one. On a more "meta" level than just the question of marijuana, also, I am reluctant to vote to deny anyone his little hobbies, whether or not they fall into the category of "things I would do", because to do so opens the door for him to do the same to me about my little hobbies. Is there anything that I do that perhaps could be considered "unusual", something that might drive a nice, "normal", everyone-should-be-just-like-me person to exclaim, "There oughta be a law!"? Gee, I don't know. Perhaps.
In short, I really don't know on this one. Perhaps I should smoke on it. :)