Watched Pot (follow-up to last month's Colorado raids) [View all]

[Scuba]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/altered_state/2013/12/colorado_marijuana_legalization_will_the_state_s_ambitious_plan_to_track.html?wpisrc=burger_bar

Colorado has a wildly ambitious plan to track every legal marijuana plant from seed to sale. Will it work?


On a crisp late-autumn day last month, federal agents raided more than a dozen medical marijuana dispensaries and grow facilities in Denver and Boulder, Colo. Armed Drug Enforcement Administration officers wearing camouflaged fatigues and black balaclavas smashed store windows, stacked crates of evidence in U-Haul trucks, and confiscated so many pot plants that the piles of foliage had to be removed by front-loader. It was the largest federal medical marijuana bust in Colorado history—and it occurred less than two months before the state is set to launch the world’s first legalized pot system on Jan. 1. How did Colorado’s marijuana industry react to the raids? If anything, with approval.

“Really, I see enforcement actions happening as a sign our industry is maturing and this program is working,” Mike Elliott, executive director of the Colorado-based Medical Marijuana Industry Group, told the Denver Post the day of the bust. Even Mason Tvert, the celebrated firebrand of the local marijuana movement, was unusually circumspect. “If a business is suspected of violating state laws, they will likely face increased scrutiny, and if they are found to be in violation, they will likely face consequences,” he told the Post.

Why the calm reaction? Mainly it was because the busts did not appear to be an attack on the state’s medical marijuana system, as has been the case with DEA raids in other states, but a targeted action against a few bad apples who were apparently flouting Colorado’s medical marijuana regulations—allegedly selling pot out of state, hiding profits, and working with Columbian drug cartels. In other words, the raids reinforced Colorado’s medical marijuana rules rather than undermining them. This was good news, since Colorado’s medical regulations form the basis of the recreational pot rules that will go into effect on Jan. 1.

The busts, in fact, were exactly the sort of enforcement Colorado policymakers and marijuana stakeholders should want right now. It’s not easy obeying Colorado’s complicated, time-consuming, and expensive marijuana rules, so those who jump through all the state’s hoops want to be sure that the competition does, too. If someone is cheating, they can cut into everyone else’s profits. That’s why nearly everyone in the industry wants the cheaters busted, since it suggests the regulatory system is working and it rewards those in compliance. (Hence the tip line posted on Colorado’s marijuana enforcement website that folks can use to report on scofflaws and “keep our industry legitimate.”) It’s why marijuana policy expert Mark Kleiman predicts legalization won’t stop pot busts anytime soon. “[T]he implication of … a legal commercial market is not that you need less enforcement,” he told Patrick Radden Keefe of The New Yorker. “In the long run, there shouldn’t be much of an illegal business … In the short run, though, the answer is just the opposite.”