The train carrying federally legalized cannabis has started to leave the station, as the House has voted both to strike marijuana from the federal list of controlled substances and to sketch the details of what a new regime would entail: an 8% marijuana tax, expungement of pot convictions and loans for start-up dealers. This is legalization rolled up in social equity: Those who are said to have been disproportionately targeted by the war on drugs would gain a measure of compensation. The theory is that people who suffered from drug crime and even those who perpetuated it would benefit from legalization.
On closer inspection, however, such a course fails to take into account how poorer neighborhoods could actually become worse off by distributing licenses and loans to small dealers, because of the risk of concentration of such licenses in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Far better to take steps to limit the number of licenses overall and even consider the possibility that the safest course for legalized cannabis would be a regime controlled by a marijuana version of another legal but harmful substance — tobacco.
The rush to distribute licenses to low-income small dealers is on, to be sure. In New York, Gov. Hochul has announced plans to grant the first 100 licenses for the sale of recreational marijuana to those who’d had convictions for once-illegal sale. It will be backed by a proposed $200 million in state funding. A similar approach is part of pot legalization in California, New Jersey and Massachusetts.
Count it as another progressive idea that risks harming those it’s promoted as helping. Because ask yourself: Do we really want a concentration of drug sale licenses in neighborhoods plagued not only by drug-related arrests but by drug use itself?
One analogy to consider. The over-concentration of liquor licenses, and cheap alcoholic beverages, has long been recognized as a problem for low-income minority neighborhoods. A Johns Hopkins School of Public Health study found that “low-income neighborhoods were eight times more likely to have more carry-out liquor stores than white or racially integrated neighborhoods.” The NIH has found that “living in an African-American neighborhood was related to increased spirits/liquor consumption and, in turn, reporting more negative drinking consequences.”
One doubts that ministers in Harlem, Bed-Stuy and Brownsville really want pot shops on every block — but that’s a risk if former drug offenders use their licenses to open dispensaries in neighborhoods with which they’re familiar. Yes, the drug laws may have been too harsh — but they were the law. Most residents of low-income neighborhoods choose to obey the law — to “work hard and play by the rules,” as Bill Clinton famously put it. By putting ex-offenders at the head of the line, we will be rewarding them, at the same time encouraging them to tempt their neighbors once again with drug use.
The damaging side effects of such benevolence are already being played out with the emergence of black markets for pot in states which have legalized it. Notably, Oakland has been plagued by gangland-style robberies of legal cannabis cultivation businesses. In other words, legalizing weed has not eliminated its illegal collateral damage.
Far better to focus on limiting the overall number of pot licenses and preventing concentration in any one zip code. Poor neighborhoods should not be the locus of legal drug dealing, even as suburban municipalities opt-out. A RAND study says the density of recreational marijuana retailers is associated with more use and a higher intensity of use among young adults. Nor should we rule out a Big Tobacco-style cannabis regime. Were a major corporation to be the pot supplier, regulation could restrain it from advertising. Labeling could make clear the emerging health risks for a product which, though touted for medical uses, has never been cleared for any by the FDA.
Pot legalization is here to stay, but it’s far better to treat weed as we do tobacco, which public health infomercials warn us off in graphic terms. We need to avoid the sports gambling and state lottery routes — in which advertisements touting winnings and fun are shown with tiny on-screen warnings about help for the gambling addicts we are undoubtedly encouraging.
As much as 1950s era alarms about marijuana’s role as a gateway to drug abuse have been caricatured, there’s reason to worry with its widespread availability. A new Massachusetts General Hospital study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that medical marijuana users “may be particularly at risk of ‘chronic use disorder’ ” and that pot may be “contraindicated” for depression and bipolar disorder. A previous study found a similar risk of chronic abuse for recreational marijuana.
Pot should be tolerated — but not celebrated. Legalization is with us, but strict control of its distribution and promotion must accompany it.
Husock is a senior fellow in domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
