Marijuana and the limits of public policy

In this thread there was some discussion of Mark Kleiman’s position on marijuana criminalization, which he recently reiterated and summarized here. Unlike some commentors, I view Kleiman as a valuable contributor on this issue—he is an excellent policy analyst who is inclined to give arguments against legalization a great deal of credibility and weight (sometimes, I suspect, too much), and he still comes down on the side of legalization. The case for continuing the status quo with respect to marijuana laws isn’t done any favors by the vacuous nonsense of David Brooks and Ruth Marcus, but they’re the quality of advocates the policy deserves.

The story of legalization in Washington and Colorado is, to me, about as optimistic a story about American democracy as I can imagine. Political elites, in an entirely bi-partisan fashion, maintained an irrational commitment to an unjust and unwise policy, and promoted an ideology designed to support it. But over time the ideology promotion began to fail, and the policy is now widely rejected, and democratic tools that allow elite consensus to be sidestepped are now being deployed to change the policy, and public opinion behind these changes is great enough that elite pushback has been, so far, fairly modest.

Where I’m unabashedly enthusiastic, Kleiman’s enthusiasm is tempered with a fair amount of grumpiness. He’s worried the model of legalization being pursued in Washington and Colorado, while a substantial improvement over the status quo, may not be the best model to pursue:

I continue to think that continued prohibition may be the worst option under current U.S. circumstances; I’m still waiting for someone who opposes legalization to sketch a reasonable alternative to the status quo. I’m inclined to think that full commercial legalization with minimal marketing restrictions and low taxes – which is where the country is currently headed – might well be the second-worst. But for now the public debate is dominated by those two bad options.

I don’t necessarily disagree with Kleiman’s all things considered preference for a different model of legalization. Nevertheless I mildly dissent from the sentiment expressed in this post. I share Erik Voeten’s view that legalization need not automatically mean increased usage. It isn’t always the case—it would appear that in the Netherlands, for example, use increased briefly before going down considerably following decriminalization, and from what I understand Portugal (a more complicated case since other drugs were decriminalized at the same time) has seen a similar dynamic. It’s not hard to imagine there’s some population of potential users who would try marijuana if it is legalized, and that that might be larger than the population who finds illicit use appealing and might lose interest. But my thinking is influenced more by recent trends. From a (much better) Reihan Salam post from this summer:

Support for marijuana legalization isn’t just growing in libertarian-minded western states. In April, the Pew Research Center found that a narrow 52 percent majority of Americans support marijuana legalization. This represents an impressive increase since 2002, when only 32 percent supported legalization. Support among adults born after 1981 has reached 65 percent, and as this cohort comes to represent a larger share of the electorate, it is easy to imagine that the pressure to legalize marijuana will grow. And while there remains a partisan divide over marijuana legalization, with fewer Republicans in favor of legalization (37 percent) than Democrats (59 percent), a majority of Republicans (57 percent) and Democrats (59 percent) believe that the federal government should not enforce federal marijuana laws in states that permit its use.

But the deeper shift is not so much political as cultural. Pew has found that the stigma against marijuana use is quickly evaporating. In 2006, 50 percent of Americans maintained that smoking marijuana was “morally wrong,” a share that has fallen to 32 percent as of 2013. Not surprisingly, marijuana use has increased as the stigma against it has faded. The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime reports that the annual prevalence of cannabis use has increased from 10 percent of the general population (persons 15-64 years of age) in 2007 to 14.1 percent in 2010.

Kleiman is a smart policy analyst. But if we went back in time and asked him, in the late 90’s, the social and political consequences of maintaining the status quo (along with a mild expansion of medical marijuana) would be 15 years from now, I sincerely doubt he would have predicted this. Public policy can certainly have an impact on trends like this, but the changes in the prevalence and patterns of drug use in society have a sufficiently complex set of determinants that predicting the effect of a change in one of them is a sufficiently difficult task that predictions about use patterns seem of limited value. The harm of criminalization, on the other hand is obvious and substantial. (I fully admit I have only casually followed Kleiman’s work; perhaps the reasons behind his apparent confidence in his prediction are more compelling than they appear from a distance.)