New data on marijuana legalization
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/08/new-data-on-marijuana-legalization.html#comments
I favoured the legalisation of cannabis in Canada (for the conventional reasons), though it was far down my list of priorities for what the government should do. Maybe I was wrong? Have there been positive social effects from this change?
There's so much to pull apart here.
First, it seems there's a conflation of the psychoactive with the delivery mechanism. I think smoking should be made generally illegal, especially in public places, and that vapors have many of the same issues.
Cannabis itself is what was made legal in Canada, and I've seen little to suggest that cannabis has caused more problems now than before.
Do we have any evidence of this?
@serge Well, at the #MarginalRevolution post, there's a link to a Bloomberg article discussing effects of marijuana legalisation in the US. Charles Fain Lehman has done some essays at City Journal that shifted my thinking, e.g., https://www.city-journal.org/article/why-legal-weed-is-losing .
I find these and other analysis lacking.
Your first post was about the role of smoking, and connecting cannabis use to increased smoking in public. But smoking is smoking, and nowhere that disallows cigarettes and vapes allow smoking cannabis.
This article is about business. That wasn't, or it should not have been any factor in legalization. The legalization argument was a moral one, not one promising financial return. I'll come back to this.
This is why the argument about "Open Source failed" is similarly nonsense to me. The argument sold to businesses that people would flock to do free labor didn't work, but that wasn't the point of the larger movement.
Much of the financial "failure" is due to the issues of transitioning from an illegal market to a legal one. If it's 1/2 the price to buy illegally, then many existing customers will continue to do that, especially if the only risk is to suppliers, and not them.
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@serge I'm not sure this is the essay I had in mind, but it's one by Mr. Lehman with a more comprehensive pro-prohibition argument: https://thecausalfallacy.com/p/how-i-changed-my-mind-about-marijuana
Read it through. I took notes, but they all point to the same thing- his arguments against decriminalization don't make sense to me. He talks about all the harms of criminalization and then dismisses them as unimportant. He then talks about the ills of cannabis use, of which there certainly are some, but doesn't compare that to alcohol and its ills, or video games and its ills.
He says the left and right seem united on decriminalization and reading this essay is a good reason to see why- the arguments for criminalization could be strong, but aren't. There's no evidence of societal harm at the level which we find acceptable for other bad habits, and yet we were spending billions on enforcement, much of which was simply used as pretext for rights violations.
I hate the smell of any smoke, and think *smoking* should be illegal, but I have yet to see a lot of compelling evidence for criminalizing cannabis that doesn't apply to other things as well.
The question is why are the illegal markets allowed to continue and the answer is largely that the positioning of "legal cannabis", at least here in BC, has been framed largely as one of removing government interference, and also because of a lack of evidence pointing towards consumer dangers in the unregulated illegal market.
What I mean is that other movements, like "raw milk" have evidence of consumer danger- there have been actual health issues linked to the sale of raw milk, thereby justifying government spending on the issue.
Illegal cannabis, on the other hand, seems to pose no real health risk. The only risk is in uncollected tax revenue.
So unless we're going to spend millions of dollars in tax enforcement, I don't see what the issue is. We don't make policy based on what will make businesses the most money.
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