LET'S BAIL OUT THE POT DEALERS!

Some dude outside my supermarket just asked me to sign a petition to
legalize marijuana. Apparently he was so high that he forgot he's in
California, where pot is already more legal than budget-balancing.
Last year I was granted a medical-marijuana license, even though I'm
healthy and I don't smoke weed. I went to a doctor's office that
consisted of a desk, a TV, two cans of air freshener and a man
wearing a Hawaiian T-shirt. I told Dr. Magnum P.I. about my constant
anxiety, insomnia and headaches -- two more conditions than any
previous patient had bothered to mention. He freaked out and gave me
a pot license for only six months until I saw a psychologist. My
lovely wife Cassandra, however, got a full year's prescription by
claiming she was afflicted with a condition called "menstruation."
Looking back, I'm pretty sure I could have used that too.

There are more medical-marijuana dispensaries in L.A. than Starbucks.
Most are like nice tea shops, where salespeople behind a counter open
glass jars so you can smell the Sugar Kush, look at the Purple Urkel
under a magnifying lens and ask about the effects of Hindu Skunk. At
the Farmacy, I spun a wheel to determine my first-time-buyer gift and
was handed a pot lollipop. If the pot-dispensary people ran General
Motors, the recession would be over. Although GM cars would be
engineered to just stare idly at the road for hours. Which is more
than they're good for now.

The vast majority of that Sugar Kush is still in our house, mostly
because Cassandra found an even more effective solution to
menstruation called pregnancy. But also because shopping for pot in
California is more fun than using it. So when Attorney General Eric
Holder declared that the Federal Government would quit busting
dispensaries, removing even the hint of consequences for
medical-marijuana use, my heart ached for small-time American pot
dealers. They can't compete on price, selection, customer service,
quality control or not-getting-arrestedness, and they have no skills
that translate into another industry. They're almost as bad off as journalists.

Of all the potheads I know -- did I mention I live in Los Angeles? --
only one still uses a dealer. He hasn't made the logical switch from
purchasing illegal drugs to committing medical fraud partly because
he doesn't want his name on a dispensary list for professional
reasons, partly out of loyalty to his dealer and partly because to
motivate a stoner, the invisible hand of capitalism first has to
endure a long, boring conversation about how cool it would be to have
an invisible hand.

But competition, it turns out, improves capitalism, even among the
members of society least capable of doing math. "The dispensaries
have really made my drug dealer step up," my friend told me. Not only
is the dealer now charging $100 for a quarter ounce, compared with
the $120 he'd charged for decades, but he has also started offering
home delivery instead of shady parking-lot meetings. "He got more
reliable. He used to be, 'Yeah, I can't do it today. Maybe tomorrow.'
Sometimes you'd page him, and he'd never call you back. Now I'm like,
'I'm going to be at my house at 4 p.m.,' and he's like, 'I'll be there.'"

Still, the dime baggers don't stand a chance. So it is the Federal
Government's responsibility to help with some sort of bailout. They
need seed money. They need a WPA's worth of pastry chefs to make pot
brownies. They need Snoop Dogg to pass on his genes to even more
children. They need to get the 3-D version of Cloudy with a Chance of
Meatballs on DVD right away.

The drug warriors were right that medical marijuana would lead to pro
forma legalization. But they were wrong about every other
consequence, like the coming wave of donations from pot dealers to
the next presidential candidate willing to criminalize medical
marijuana. Also, legitimizing pot hasn't created more users; it has
just produced more annoying ones, who now apply Whole Foods -- ian
levels of snobbiness to the differences between Hawaiian Sativa and
Humboldt Indica.

As always, federal decisions have lots of unintended consequences,
and many of them are good. As dispensaries wipe out pot dealers, teen
drug use will fall dramatically. Instead of buying pot from a dealer,
teenagers will have to struggle with the same imperfect methods they
use to get alcohol: begging older siblings, stealing from their
parents and waiting outside a dispensary until they find a guy creepy
enough to accept a $20 bribe.

The bad part is that without any business to do, the last remaining
pot dealers will now have absolutely no reason to stop talking and
leave your apartment.