Author: Jack Mulcaire
Perhaps the most talked-about measure on this year’s ballot was Prop. 19, which would have legalized possession of marijuana for people over age 21, as well as growth of the plant for personal use. The proposition would have also authorized local governments to make laws regarding commercial growth and use of marijuana in their own municipalities, and put taxes on that commercial activity.
To have a worthwhile debate about the failed law, we must consider the current state of marijuana laws in California and what would have really change if Prop. 19 passed.
Right now, possession of one ounce or less of marijuana is punishable with a $100 fine similar to a traffic violation. Prop. 19 would have maintained this one ounce limit: Under the law, one ounce is the maximum amount a person is allowed to own or purchase for personal use.
Since 1996, the use of marijuana for medical purposes has been legal in California. According to the California Health and Safety Code, the law allows a doctor to recommend marijuana as medicine for “any illness for which marijuana provides relief,” and allows the plant to be cultivated by “patients or their primary caregiver.”
This gives doctors extreme latitude in giving patients legal access to marijuana, considering it can be approved for essentially any sort of ailment.
Furthermore, there are many practicing physicians that advertise the fact that they are willing to provide marijuana approvals. A lot of these can be found on the California National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana (NORML) website.These laws have led to the existence of many marijuana collectives in California. In fact, there are a number of these establishments within walking distance of Occidental.
California Department of Health and Safety reports that there are hundreds of dispensaries and about 50,000 card-carrying users. Not every legal user has a card, but the total number of legal users was estimated at about 200,000 by the Guardian in 2008.
Many of these legal users are patently not the sort of patient the medical marijuana program was designed to help.
They are often healthy people who have paid for a medical card from a doctor, to treat hard-to-define illnesses like “anxiety” and “chronic pain.” It’s simply not possible to regulate that sort of activity. It’s easy in California today to go to a doctor and claim illness, then head right to the dispensary.
The important part of all this is that people who can buy marijuana legally often share it with, or sell it to, non-legal users and often make profits. In this way, most of California’s smoking population already has access to marijuana that originated from a legal source. Abuse of the medical marijuana system has made access to marijuana easier.
Essentially, the marijuana economy is already working much as it would after the hypothetical passage of Prop. 19, albeit on a smaller scale, through abuse of the medical marijuana system and because law enforcement is making marijuana less and less of a priority, as evidenced by the decriminalization laws. There is already a legal marijuana industry in California, as evinced by the fact that there are hundreds of dispensaries and legal growth co-ops. There are already millions of smokers. And, as shown above, possession of personal amounts of marijuana is already decriminalized and treated like a traffic violation.
So what does this all mean for the failed Prop. 19 and future propositions like it? It means that most effects that marijuana legalization would have on our society have already happened thanks to the easy availability of legal marijuana to medical and non-medical users. People who want marijuana can already get it about as easily as they would have been able to if Prop. 19 had passed. The proposition would have mainly put an end to marijuana’s current state of pseudo-legality and create an infrastructure for using the marijuana industry to bring more revenue into the State Treasury.
Some would argue that legalizing is cause for more people to smoke merely because it is legal. I can’t say for sure that this is false, but the experience of other countries indicates that it is. The Netherlands has legalized marijuana with easy availability, yet it has about half the rate of teen marijuana use that the United States has.
Others would argue that marijuana legalization would reduce crime by taking away profits from drug cartels. A recent study by the RAND Corporation, a Washington, D.C. think tank, shows that Mexico’s main drug smuggling organizations would probably only see a two to five percent decline in revenue as a result of legalization in California.
I contend that this is mainly because most marijuana demand in California is already met by co-ops and dispensaries whose product illegally reaches non-medical users. California marijuana is generally both cheaper and of higher quality than marijuana produced in Mexico and smuggled to the United States.
Another issue raised is the increased marijuana tax revenue and hemp cultivation. This is a point I must agree with. Prop. 19 would have eliminated marijuana’s current pseudo-legal status and caused the illegal sales that I have described to be taxed.
Thus, marijuana legalization would help California fiscally. In this way, Prop. 19 would have definitely changed the nature of the marijuana economy and have a positive effect on society.
Also, growth of non-psychoactive hemp would undoubtedly help California agriculture, more so than psychoactive marijuana.
A comprehensive discussion of hemp is outside of the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that there is a massive untapped market for hemp products in the U.S., and this is one of the reasons that marijuana was banned in the first place.
Jack Mulcaire is an undeclared first-year. He can be reached at mulcaire@oxy.edu.
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