Marijuana

This commentary appeared in USA Today on April 25, 2013.

Believe me, I've heard all the pot jokes, and some of them are true. Public support for legalizing marijuana use is at an all-time high. Some state-level marijuana laws are going up in smoke. And yes, Washington and Colorado are embarking on a historic joint venture.

Puns aside, discussions about marijuana legalization are getting serious. In November, voters in Colorado and Washington made the unprecedented decision to allow commercial production, distribution and possession of marijuana for nonmedical purposes. Not even the Netherlands goes that far.

With voters in Colorado and Washington deciding to legalize marijuana last election season and a recent poll indicating that 52 percent of Americans now support legalizing the use of marijuana—the first such majority in more than 40 years of polling—serious discussions about drug policy abound.

To weigh in on these developments and more, Beau Kilmer, co-director of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center and coauthor of Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know, hosted an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) session on Reddit this week. Kilmer fielded questions from participants on a variety of drug policy issues.

This November, Washington state, Oregon, and Colorado voters will consider ballot measures to legalize the production, distribution, and possession of marijuana for nonmedical purposes. Even if voters pass these measures at the state level, marijuana will still be prohibited by the federal government. How might the federal government react?

Two years ago, California voters rejected Proposition 19, which sought to legalize and regulate the recreational use of marijuana (46.5% voted "yes"). At the time, Attorney General Eric Holder agreed with voters and made clear that the government would "vigorously enforce" the federal laws against marijuana.

Beau Kilmer, senior policy researcher and codirector of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center, discusses what makes marijuana legalization so dramatically different from mere decriminalization.

This excerpt from Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know appeared on Huffington Post on July 12, 2012.

If alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana, what's the logical justification for one being legal and the other illegal?

If we were making laws for a planet whose population had never experienced either marijuana or alcohol, and we had to choose one of the two drugs to make available, there would be a strong case for choosing marijuana, which has lower organic toxicity, lower addictive risk, and a much weaker link with accidents and violence.

But that's not the planet we inhabit. Here on this planet, alcohol has been an ingrained part of many cultures since the Neolithic revolution (which may have been driven in part by the discovery that grain could be brewed into beer). People have used cannabis plant products for thousands of years, but its widespread use as an intoxicant in the United States is a phenomenon of the last hundred years. Even today only about one in sixteen American adults used marijuana at all in the course of a typical year; for alcohol, that figure is more than half.

This commentary appeared in The Wall Street Journal on April 20, 2012.

Discussions about legalizing marijuana should start with a few basic truths.

One is that legalization would save the law-enforcement and social costs of arresting hundreds of thousands of adults each year. (Most proposals would keep marijuana illegal for those under 21.) Another is that pot's underground economy—estimated at $15 billion to $30 billion annually—would be largely wiped out if marijuana were legalized throughout the country. Finally, it is clear that legalization would greatly decrease price and, therefore, increase the number of both recreational and heavy marijuana users.

Beyond these facts, the ramifications get extremely murky. Being honest about the uncertainties involved is the price of admission to any serious discussion about marijuana legalization.