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Against State Issue 3
SCOTT PIEPHO
Cases and Controversies
Published: October 16, 2015
I have vacillated about State Issue 3, the marijuana legalization proposal. But I now firmly oppose it.
Issue 3 accomplishes one good thing: it fully legalizes marijuana possession for adults. I am a relatively recent convert to legalizing marijuana. Generally I do not care for vice industries, because most of those industries’ profits come from unhealthily heavy use of relatively few users. For example, in post-legalization Colorado a little less than 30 percent of users represent 85 percent of the demand for the drug. I have been concerned that marijuana would become yet another industry dependent on (and therefore tacitly encouraging) problem users.
On the other hand, prohibition costs society a great deal – primarily in the form of criminal justice spending, lost productivity of those prosecuted and forgone tax revenues – without conferring any benefit.
According to the ACLU, even though Ohio has decriminalized marijuana, we spend $120 million enforcing laws against marijuana with arrests for marijuana constituting half of all drug-related arrests. Moreover, while African-Americans use marijuana at a slightly higher rate than whites, in Ohio, blacks are nearly four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana.
Furthermore, prohibition is irrational given what we as a society permit. We allow three recreational mind altering drugs – caffeine, nicotine and alcohol. Of these, caffeine is fairly innocuous, while alcohol and tobacco are far more dangerous and disruptive than marijuana. Even with use dropping steadily, nearly half a million deaths can be annually attributed directly to tobacco use. About 88,000 alcohol-related deaths occur each year, plus it is a factor in 40 percent of violent crimes.
In contrast, few deaths can be attributed to marijuana. Over the long run it probably poses cancer risks to those who smoke it, but in the short run it does not result in overdose deaths, it is seldom implicated in violent crimes and while a driver intoxicated on marijuana is more likely to get into an accident, the chances are far less than for a driver who is drunk. The real risk the drug poses is long term habitual use. We should discourage that level of use, but even so being a stoner is healthier than being a drunk.
(For the record I don’t use marijuana – nor for that matter do I use alcohol or tobacco. On the other hand, my life does not occur without caffeine.)
So I had been leaning toward voting for Issue 3, notwithstanding the oligopoly created by the ballot measure. The ballot issue limits large-scale marijuana growing to 10 identified facilities, each owned by high-dollar contributors to the campaign. That’s a bad thing to write into a state’s constitution. If 10 rich people sat down with state representatives and asked for a state-enforced oligopoly in exchange for high-dollar campaign contributions, we would never stand for it.
Still I might have voted for legalization with the hope that subsequent ballot measures could clean up its unsavory features. But then I read an article on the online news site Vox. Drug policy experts interviewed for the piece point out that the proposal would set up a regulatory board and charge it with ensuring that the 10 identified facilities produce sufficient marijuana to meet demand. This proposed mission is equivalent to charging a liquor control agency with making sure that Ohioans have plenty of cheap vodka. The experts fear that the system will flood the state with cheap marijuana, driving up use.
This would be exacerbated by relatively low taxes. The proposed measure imposes a 15 percent tax on the gross revenues of growing operations, and a 5 percent tax gross receipts form retail sales. Both tobacco and alcohol are taxed on a per-unit basis, not simply as a percentage of cost, and for each the tax is considerably higher than that proposed for marijuana. And again, the proposal writes this low tax rate into the state constitution, making it difficult to change.
Sound drug policy would involve legalizing marijuana, but using the regulatory apparatus to discourage heavy use by keeping the price as high as possible without precipitating a large black market. Issue 3 is not sound drug policy; it is industrial policy organized around large scale marijuana production.
I worry that a decisive defeat of Issue 3 would set back the cause for legalization. Still, I find too many problems with a proposal that will be chiseled into the state constitution. I have written before that the federal government should downgrade marijuana from its prohibitive Schedule 1 classification and allow states to experiment with different models for legalizing recreational use. But we cannot risk the likely failures of this particular experiment.