"I Gots Mine":

DISPENSARY OWNERS AGAINST MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION

Yesterday on our daily webcast for NORML we interviewed Dale Sky
Clare, a spokesperson for Proposition 19, the initiative that will ask
Californians to vote on a very limited form of marijuana legalization.
We discussed the latest polling on the initiative from SurveyUSA,
showing a 50%-to-40% lead for the measure.

We dug through the demographics to find that older and more
conservative people are the only groups more likely to oppose the
measure (no, really?), support is greatest among the young and in the
Bay Area (who knew?), and support among comedians named "Cheech" or
"Chong" is approaching 100% (OK, I made the last one up.)

But there is one growing demographic group that no poll has begun to
track: medical marijuana dispensary owners.

Since the Regulate, Control, and Tax Cannabis Initiative was
mercifully truncated to a headline-friendly "Prop 19" by virtue of
making it on the California ballot, I have been tracking on our NORML
Stash Blog the stories of dispensary owners who are publicly opposing
the legalization of the product they sell, even shelling out money
they've made from selling marijuana to oppose its legalization!

Paul Jury just posted Legalize It? Ask a Guy Who Runs a Medicinal
Marijuana Dispensary in which he speaks to Craig, a dispensary owner
in Venice Beach, who is also opposed to Prop 19:

"I'll give you two reasons," Craig said. "One is big tobacco. Did you
know that Phillip Morris just bought 400 acres of land up in Northern
California? The minute marijuana becomes legal, they'll mass produce
and flood the market. And of course, they'll add the same toxins they
put in regular cigarettes to get you addicted, and very little THC, so
you'll have to buy more... In short, they're going to ruin weed." He
gestured around his beloved shop, with every flavor of every strain,
in its purist form, selling for at-cost prices. "I like the way things
are now."

Remember how alcohol prohibition ended in the 1930's (probably not,
but indulge me) and Anheuser, Busch, Coors, and Miller flooded the
market with 3.2 beer and ruined alcohol? Wouldn't it be nice if we
could go to shops with every flavor of every micro-brew, in its purest
form... oh, wait, I live in Portland, Oregon, the micro-brew capital
of America and that's what we have right now under alcohol
legalization!

We have every flavor and potency of beer you can imagine plus people
can go buy a kit and brew their own beer if they like. And there is
wine, too, with a huge tourist industry that depends on people
checking out vineyards and tasting endless varieties of vino. And
there is whiskey, rum, tequila, vodka, brandy, and even super-potent
Everclear in some states, all in their purest form, which is to say
that used responsibly they won't make you blind like a tub of
Prohibition moonshine might.

The "Philip Morris / RJ Reynolds Toxic Addictive High-less Marijuana
Market Flood" scare has been floating around the cannabis community
like a stale hit of schwag for decades now. It's a form of conspiracy
theory thinking embraced by the kind of people who think you could
plant 40,000 lbs. of explosives surreptitiously in a busy World Trade
Center or convince all the world's scientists and a very large
soundstage crew to keep quiet about that faked moon landing for four
decades. Here's why it's stupid:

* Prop 19 allows you to grow your own. If Philip Morris' weed sucks,
you'll smoke your own or your friend's.

* Prop 19 allows cities to consider sales. Bad toxic Philip Morris
weed is the kind of competition a purveyor of hand-trimmed,
non-keifed*, organic high-potency bud would want, wouldn't she?

* Prop 19 allows cities to regulate production. They can dictate
exactly what is or isn't added to cannabis, how much is produced, by
whom, and where.

* In order for Philip Morris to sell their weed, somebody has to want
to smoke it. Nothing about Prop 19 makes Prop 215 or the dispensaries
go away. In fact, it gives the existing dispensaries the potential to
serve even more customers. So who's buying this toxic addictive
high-less marijuana?

No, if you want to really understand what is going on here, look back
to that alcohol prohibition and ask yourself how excited Al Capone was
reading the headlines trumpeting its imminent repeal. It's not a
perfect analogy, as Capone was a murderous criminal thug and these
dispensary owners are law-abiding businesspeople. And yes, dispensary
owners, like Craig, often help destitute cancer patients for free,
though one could counter that Capone and his gangs gave out free
turkeys on Thanksgiving. My main point is that both are businesspeople
dealing in a prohibited product.

Or just look back to the article on Craig:

He gestured around his beloved shop, with every flavor of every
strain, in its purist form, selling for at-cost prices. "I like the
way things are now."

"Last month," Craig explained proudly, "there were 24 operating
marijuana collectives in Venice. A month from now, there will only be
two. And we'll be one of them." With that, he opened the door to the
inner sanctum. The "product" room.

Now, if you ran a business where you could sell your product for
$5-$15 per GRAM or $200 to $800 per OUNCE, and you only had to compete
with one other business in your local area, would you be excited about
the prospect of many more competitors and prices dropping as much as
80%? Most of your customers already got their Prop 215 recommendation,
so it isn't as if legalization is going to bring you enough additional
customers to offset the change in business margins.

Prop 19 means that marijuana retailers become more like other retail
businesses, instead of the loosely-regulated turnkey goldmines they
have been. That's what Craig doesn't like. Well, that and kids smoking
pot:

"Two, legalization will mean more fifteen-year-old kids smoking pot.
If they legalize marijuana, there's no chance that fewer
15-year-olds will smoke. And there's a good chance that more will.
Anything that will probably make more 15-year-olds put substances in
their bodies, in my opinion, is a bad thing."

Really, the "What About the Children?!?" argument? Right now, under
prohibition, 85% of high school seniors and 69% of sophomores (a.k.a.
fifteen-year-olds) find it easy to get weed. Right now, under
prohibition, kids say it is easier to buy marijuana than alcohol. So
it appears to me that locking up healthy adults for their marijuana
use hasn't really done much to stop teens from getting and using pot.
How about we try letting adults smoke a joint, and when they go to buy
it, they buy it from a regulated shop where only adults are let in and
all IDs are rigorously checked, you know, like that alcohol kids find
harder to buy.

Besides, there is no reason to believe that youth use will increase.
Since California passed Prop 215 in 1996, the regime Craig likes now,
teen use of marijuana has decreased. Prop 19 makes the penalty for
supplying weed to those under 21 as stringent as supplying alcohol to
those under 21. And we've seen teen use of tobacco, a legal substance
far cheaper and more addictive than marijuana, plummet in the past ten
years through education, advertising restriction, social disapproval
(no indoor smoking, for example) and strict ID requirements.

Craig and the other dispensary owners who oppose Prop 19 are the "I
Gots Mine" element of the anti-legalization campaign. They've got the
corner on a retail market worth billions, one that is only worth
billions if you arrest 850,000 mostly-black-and-brown adults a year
for participating in it. They've got their doctors happy to take a
Benjamin or two to give you permission to use a drug safer than the
aspirin you need no permission for. I wouldn't want people to vote to
change that, either....except that I think it's just immoral to
arrest people for smoking
weed if we're going to leave them alone when drinking alcohol. I don't
care if it is profitable to the state or detrimental to the dispensary
industry - arrests for marijuana are wrong, period.

*"Kiefed" means to shake loose the crystals of THC from the product
before packaging for sale. The crystals, or "kief" are collected and
smoked or vaporized, and, being THC crystals, are very effective.
Philip Morris will certainly need to use huge machines to process
weed, which will certainly shake loose a lot of kief. One grower
friend of mine says he will advertise for his prized buds with the
slogan "Don't let 'em thief the kief!"