by Dave Maier
I had not intended to return to the issue of marijuana legalization so soon after my last such post, but this will be my last post before the November election, and there are ballot initiatives about marijuana legalization in no fewer than nine states – four medical marijuana (Arkansas, Montana, Florida, and North Dakota), and five “recreational” (California, Nevada, Arizona, Maine, and Massachusetts) – so here we go again. I won’t give a general argument for or against, but just give a sense of the wide variety of relevant issues. If you live in any of these states, please be sure to read the particular initiative carefully before voting.
Marijuana users constitute a small minority of the population, but recent polls have shown consistent majorities in favor of legalization. Not surprisingly, older voters and Republicans are less likely to support it, although not by large margins. More surprising is the opposition to the various legalization initiatives by those otherwise in favor. Why would one want to legalize marijuana but oppose an initiative which does that very thing?
For an answer, let us direct our browsers to noon1.me (“No on [Maine’s ballot proposition] 1”). Again, one might expect a site with that name to argue that it would be horrible to allow our citizens to freely take drugs to get high on drugs, and no doubt there are such sites (for a refresher on prohibitionism, see my previous post). Instead, its focus is mainly on the various regulations involved in, as proponents of the initiative put it, “regulating marijuana like alcohol”. These regulations are necessary, proponents believe, in order to sell the idea to non-users, and indeed the only successful initiatives to date (in Colorado, Washington, Alaska, Oregon, and DC), as well as the various initiatives likely to do well this year, have a whole laundry list of regulations on public use, home growing, DUI limits, possession limits, and so on. This is especially true in California, where the tag line for this year’s effort (“Let’s get it right”) alludes to the apparently overly lax nature of the failed legalization initiative there in 2010.