 We're here today to talk about how to not make a hash out of marijuana legalization. I promise you that's the last pun that you'll hear from me on this subject. It is a very important subject. I'm just going to say a very few words to sort of set this up. I think we probably have a great diversity of opinions in even the small room about what should be the future of marijuana in the United States. But we find ourselves at a moment where in the world as we find it, it's no longer a question of whether marijuana is going to be legal in many parts of the United States. It's a question of how it's going to be regulated, taxed, controlled, if at all. So today we have a great panel of folks who've come from literally all parts of the continent who give different perspectives on what we should do going forward in the way of regulating, controlling marijuana. And I think without any further ado, I'll introduce my colleague, Paul Glastres, editor of Washington Monthly, who will introduce the rest of the panel. So thank you very much. Thank you, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. I am grateful to Phil Longman, my colleague at the Washington Monthly, and also a senior research fellow here at New America Foundation and want to just thank New America Foundation for hosting this event. This event started off as a package of stories in the latest issue of the Washington Monthly called How to Save Marijuana Legalization. And the concept is that, as Phil said, legalization is happening. We have some grave fears about how it's going to roll out. And so we published this package of stories which was anchored by Mark Cleiman, also Jonathan Calkins and Jonathan Rausch. And today we're going to be talking about that and other aspects of the subject. So let me just introduce our panelists and we'll get right to it. Mark Cleiman is professor of public policy in the UCLA School of Public Affairs and a consultant to Washington State in its marijuana legalization efforts. He's the author of Marijuana, Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control, and he's co-author of Drugs and Drug Policy, What Everyone Needs to Know. He edits the Journal of Drug Policy analysis and has worked for the U.S. Department of Justice for the city of Boston as a legislative assistant to Congressman Les Aspin at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and blogs at the reality-based community and the Washington Monthly. I hope I got all that. Mark, it's an honor to have you here. We also have Allison Holcomb. She is the criminal justice director of the ACLU in Washington State. She served as a vice president of the Washington Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and chaired the legal framework group of the King County Bar Association's Drug Policy Project. And in 2008, a normal awarded her the Pauline Saban Award in recognition of the importance of women in leadership positions in organizations dedicated to the ending of marijuana prohibition. We're also pleased to have Sue Rushi. She is co-founder, president and chief executive officer of National Families in Action. Founded in 1977, NFIA has helped shape the drug prevention field under her direction. NFIA's helped parents form drug prevention groups throughout the United States, helped lead the volunteer parent drug prevention movement and helped contribute to the two-thirds reduction in the past month drug use among adolescents and young adults and a 500% drop in daily marijuana use among high school seniors. That drop occurring between 1979 and 1992. And finally, batting cleanup. We have Jonathan Roush, good friend of the Washington Monthly, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution here in Washington, D.C. Jonathan is the author of six books and many articles on public policy, culture and government and an expert in the field of marijuana legalization. He is a contributing editor of the National Journal and The Atlantic and is the recipient of the 2005 National Magazine Award, the magazine industry's equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize. So without further ado, I'd like to invite Mark Kleinman on up to start us off. Thanks very much, Paul, and thanks Phil for setting this up and to all of you for coming out. It's an honor to be part of this group. I'm violating my religious tenets by having a PowerPoint, but I promise you there's only one slide. When we talk about drug policy in general, the cannabis policy in particular, both sides of the debate tend to cast their positions in moralistic terms, leading to a very high ratio of heat to light in the debate. So I want to suggest that when we think about cannabis legalization, we think in terms of advantages and disadvantages, good and bad things that will concretely happen in the world as a result. And it seems to me the beginning of wisdom in this business is to acknowledge that both good and bad things will happen as a result of cannabis legalization. 650,000 people a year will not be arrested. 40,000 people will not be behind bars at any one time. Lawbreakers will not earn $40 billion a year for illegal activity. State and local governments and the federal government will not spend a couple of billion dollars a year on enforcement. There's a potential substantial revenue to the states on the order of maybe $20 billion a year. And 33 million people who smoke marijuana but don't break any other law will suddenly be on the right side of the law rather than on the wrong side of the law. So there's a gain in personal liberty, there's a gain in welfare, consumer welfare for those cannabis users who do not have a drug problem. The disadvantage of cannabis legalization comes in the increase in the number of people who do have a drug problem. And that's not a tiny number. Two to four million would be a reasonable guess at the number of Americans currently in the grip of substance use disorder where the primary drug involved is cannabis. And those people account for a small fraction of cannabis users, there are about 33 million people who will say in a survey that they've used cannabis in the last year but they account for more than 90% of the cannabis sold. So they are not peripheral, they're central to the market and they will be central to the legal market as well. So we're worried about an increase in the number of those people and in the number of high school students, even middle school students now who are using cannabis and having that interfere with their education and their personal development. Very hard to believe that making a drug cheaper and more available will not increase the number of people who use it and in particular making it cheaper is likely to increase the number of people who use it a lot. If you're a casual cannabis user and an adult with an adult income the two or three or four dollars it costs you to get stoned it's probably not a substantial fraction of your budget, in fact you're probably spending more on the Doritos. So it's hard to see that casual users will be much influenced by a drop in price. But if you're smoking eight joints a day which is an extreme but not the most extreme pattern of cannabis use then the price matters to you and if you're a teenager on an allowance it matters to you. So it seems to me that it's crucial to think in terms of price. So as we design cannabis legalization we ought to be thinking about designing a form of legalization that gets us the benefits of getting rid of prohibition with as little of the additional drug abuse as we can get. If the goal is to get no additional drug abuse I don't think that's in this universe. It's going to have some disadvantages. My claim is that the alcohol model private for-profit production and sale with essentially unlimited marketing and relatively modest taxes and regulations directed almost entirely at keeping kids from buying it directly from the stores. That's the current alcohol model. I want to claim that's a very unsatisfactory model for alcohol and an equally unsatisfactory model for cannabis. I think that's the worst possible legalization outcome. And that's true in part because commercialization focuses the attention of the resulting industry on those heavy users who are their big market. And so they will strongly resist any form of regulation that will reduce the growth in problem cannabis use. And of course they'll strongly resist anything that reduces cannabis use by minor since that's the future of their industry. And now that we see that the National Cannabis Industry Association has hired a perfectly straightforward K Street lobbyist we can expect that that point of view is going to be heard. There are people in the cannabis legalization movement whose goal of having cannabis available to adults who want to use it responsibly is in my view completely consistent with the public interest. But the cannabis lobby, the cannabis industry has purposes that are completely inconsistent with the public interest and therefore it seems to me a bad idea to let them take over as they're likely to. The current process of state by state legalization by initiative whether it's done sort of sloppily in Colorado or very carefully as it was done in Washington that process is likely to lead us to something like the alcohol model. And if we do that in enough states when the Congress finally gets around to legalizing we're going to be locked into that model which again I think is probably the second worst outcome compared only to leaving the laws where they are. So my argument is we need federal action to structure state choice and we need it now not in the sweet buy and buy. Whether that's politically feasible I leave to people who are here who are wiser than I am. It seems to me our goal ought to be to have some presidential candidate in 2016 say I'm not against all marijuana legalization, I'm against dumb marijuana legalization. And that seems to me to be a plausible thing to say. So let me say just a word about what I think the substance of good policy would be. Keep price from falling. I see no benefit whatever in allowing cannabis to fall below its current illicit market price. It's plenty cheaper than beer as an intoxicant. So I don't see anybody who gains from having it be cheaper and I see lots of losses in terms of increased drug abuse and use by minors. We need to think about controlling the information flow, both the marketing activity of the industry and prevention messages from government and nonprofits and also point of sale stuff you could require from the vendors. One question that hasn't really come up is how much training should somebody have to be a cannabis seller? Should that person look more like a bartender or more like a pharmacist? I think Uruguay got that one right. So there's a whole set of questions about how we get information to consumers and what information we get to them. And the Supreme Court's commercial free speech jurisprudence is really in the way of doing that right. One way to get out of that and other problems is not to have commercial retailing. Have retailing be on a not-for-profit basis or on a government monopoly basis. And then the condition of sale from the wholesalers to the retailers could be no marketing. And I think that gets around the First Amendment issue. But something has to be done if we don't want to have a new version of bud versus bud light on next year's Super Bowl. The other crucial factor here, it seems to me, is whether we give the consumers any tools to protect themselves against their own potential bad habits. And it seems to me the obvious thing to do here, though not something we've actually done on any other bad habit-forming activity, is to require everybody who wants to be a cannabis user to sign up and to set a personal quota. How much do you want to be allowed to buy every month? No upper limit on that. You can set any limit you want. And you can reset your limit at any time you want, but only on two weeks notice. But if you get to the store and you've already bought your monthly quota, the clerk will say to you, I'm sorry, I can't serve you until the 12th of the next month. I don't know how many people that will save from walking down the sad path to substance use disorder. I can't believe it won't save anybody, and it's hard for me to see any harm it does. So that's the one thing I would want to put on the table as potentially a new idea. And yes, just to anticipate questions, I'd want to apply that to alcohol and to gaming as well. There's more to say, but there's not more time. Thanks very much. Good morning. Thank you all for being here. By way of a little bit of disclosure, in addition to the information that Paul provided in my introduction, I'll let you know that I was the primary author of Washington State Initiative Measure 502 and was also the campaign director for New Approach Washington, which was the political action committee that supported passage of the initiative. So you can ask me all kinds of details about the 64 pages of the document because I wrote them, and we'll be happy to answer those questions. I'd like to actually, if we could, have the PowerPoint presentation backed up. It's great to have something to refer to when you are defending having promoted the corporate takeover of marijuana. So I'd like to begin though with this observation. I think most of my comments will reflect my frame about what this conversation should be focused on, which is not spending so much time focusing on supply side strategies. I think that's been one of the great failures of the war on drugs in general, is that we try to control the people who are supplying the commodity that is in demand, and we don't spend enough time, energy, or resources on demand side strategies on actually helping young people especially make healthier choices to either not ever use marijuana or more realistically to put off trying marijuana until their brains are fully developed. Really our conversation today, if we're talking about minimizing the harms of marijuana legalization, should be about delaying initiation of marijuana use, because that's what all of the science tells us, is that if we can protect children and help them make smarter decisions about when to use any intoxicant if they're going to, we've won the game. That is the major battle. Children evolve into adults, get to be 21, 25 preferably in age, the risk of all of the harmful outcomes of any substance use diminish demonstrably. So in Mark's PowerPoint, most of this I would agree with. I do have some questions. First, with respect to the alcohol model being the worst legal option and big increases in heavy use, I think we need to consider the fact that alcohol use has actually fallen since its heyday in the 1970s, about 20%. And it's done that not with any sort of criminal prohibition strategies. And it's done that in the absences Mark rightly points out of any significant controls on alcohol advertising. Tobacco use has been cut in half. In Washington state, youth initiation of tobacco use has been cut in half since we finally started investing funds in demand side strategies. Truth.com is a national example of what I'm talking about, but essentially localized prevention strategies that work. They are effective. And if you invest in them, you can have an impact. A 50% reduction in tobacco initiation by youth is a significant impact. Policy details do in fact matter. So let me talk to you a little bit about what Initiative 502 does. When we were drafting Initiative 502, what we did is we went and we met with experts in the fields of prevention, treatment, law enforcement. The University of Washington Social Development Research Group is a very well-recognized national institute that actually studies what works with prevention. And what they will tell you is that what we know about prevention programs now compared to 30 years ago is significantly different. Prevention actually does work. 30 years ago, people would be telling you that prevention doesn't work, because just saying no doesn't work. Showing images of an egg in a frying pan doesn't work. What actually works in prevention is a holistic approach to it. We're talking about increasing investments and protective factors for children. That's not necessarily just getting them information. In fact, it could be the opposite of that. The DARE program failed. There were kids that never thought about taking drugs until the DARE program taught them about drugs. It's not necessarily true that we want to get information to kids. What we do want to do is get effective prevention strategies funded. We know what they are, but we don't fund them and we don't fund them consistently. And that's what Initiative 502 does. We imposed a steep excise tax on it, which I know I think Mark is already talking about price. Tax policy is a way that you can have an impact on the price. We have dedicated 80% of the excise tax that we've applied to marijuana to prevention, education, treatment, and importantly, research and evaluation. We're actually going to have an independent body, the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, cost-benefit analysis of Initiative 502 in 2015, 2017, 2022, and 2032. Because while we firmly believe, and when I say we, those of us that supported the passage of Initiative 502, while we firmly believe that the public safety and public health outcomes of moving to a public health model and away from a prohibition model are going to be positive, we also want to be held accountable and we want to take a measurement of that. That is what's missing from a lot of different policies is regular evaluation and giving policymakers the data that they need to make changes if necessary. So what does prevention look like? It could look like actually keeping kids in school. It could look like supporting single mothers or single fathers and making sure that they are engaged with their children. It can look like a lot of different things. We should be very worried about anyone that's telling us that just getting out the message, not to use marijuana, is going to work. State-level initiatives lead to bad outcomes. So, you know, I wrote it and supported it, so I sort of have to disagree with that, right? It's kind of part of it. I'd also like to point out that national policy around marijuana has not been terribly good. If you look at the history of what Congress has done with marijuana going back to 1937 in the Marijuana Tax Act, where the one scientific expert, the doctor, said that they shouldn't actually try to prohibit marijuana through an excessive tax that was ignored, I'm not terribly confident that Congress is the right body to help us shape marijuana policy. I do think that there is a benefit to allowing, especially in these early stages, the individual states to develop different proposals for how to go forward, because the truth of the matter is that none of us knows exactly what will happen. We have lessons that we should be looking at from alcohol and from tobacco, and in a few years we're going to have good data out of Washington state that will help inform choices moving forward. I don't think we're ready to establish a national policy. I'm not terribly confident that a national policy would actually be that beneficial for us. I'm especially concerned when I think about the fact that when President Nixon was in office, 70% of national drug dollars went to prevention and treatment, and only 30% to supply side strategies, intervention. That ratio has shifted, it's flipped. So now we only spend 30% of our national dollars on prevention and treatment, and 70% on interdiction that's clearly not working. I think that it makes sense to let the states move forward and to develop policies that are focused on how we actually help children make better choices rather than focusing on big marijuana. And that's the last comment that I would like to leave to you, and here's my suggestion, is let's think about not making big marijuana a monolith. I think when you talk about big alcohol and you're trying to influence consumer choices, you don't leave the consumer with any options. Big alcohol is bad. I'm not going to stop buying alcohol, so you're not helping me make a socially conscious choice about who I should give my dollars to. What if you actually told me, did you know that Budweiser does X, Y, and Z when it comes to marketing to children? Whereas, I don't know, Microbrew or some other brand is actually doing X, Y, and Z. Single out the bad actors, because we're talking about economic gain here, and reputational costs are significant. If I know who the better guys are, if not necessarily the good guys are, when it comes to buying a certain category of product, I'm going to make that choice. And I think that just as we've seen in Colorado, where even though the prices have gone through the roof with the opening of the legal stores because supply is so restricted, people are still queuing up because they want to buy legal marijuana. They want to pay taxes. They want to do right by their communities. Let's give consumers the option of doing that. If we tell consumers, you will be doing better by children if you don't give your dollars to that marijuana peddler who's actually selling gummy bears across the street from the elementary school. They will make that choice. Help them make that choice. Incentivize socially conscious capitalism. Thank you very much. Hello. Thank you very much for inviting me to be here. I'm going to add some of the same kinds of thoughts you've heard from Mark and from Allison. But I'm probably going to have a different opinion about what we ought to do. First of all, I think we need to, I agree with Mark and with Allison that we need to look at the alcohol model, but we also need to look at the tobacco model. And we can learn quite a bit about what might happen with marijuana if we clearly understand what is happening with tobacco and alcohol. First of all, proponents of legalization say that we should have an age limit. And I will tell you that age limits are not enough to stop children from using. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows us that five out of ten new smokers today are under age 18 and eight out of ten new drinkers are under age 21. So having an age limit is not enough. There are two powerful industries with quite a bit of money behind them that are continuously marketing to kids. And there are some reasons for that which we'll get to in a minute. To further exemplify that point, this is all the illegal drugs from, again, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. And what, if I can get this to work, the pointer is not going to work on us. What this is showing you is illegal drugs used over the life span. So the bars on the left are 12-year-olds. The bars on the right are 65-plus. And in order to show you what happens with legal drugs and the money that they have to market and advertise in order to increase consumption, we had to make this slide on a 70% scale so that we could show you what happens when you have legal drugs, legal addictive drugs that have money to market to increase consumption. The red bars are alcohol, again. The bars on the left are 12-year-olds. The bars on the right are 65-plus. The blue bars are tobacco. And the red, excuse me, the green bars are marijuana. Marijuana is quasi-legal in 20 states. It's illegal for medicine. People have access to it. It is beginning to rise. We expect with legalization to see those green bars become as tall as the blue bars and eventually as tall as the red bars. The tobacco and alcohol industries know the science as well as we do. The younger children are, when they start using an addictive drug, the more likely they'll become addicted. And lifetime customers and children are key to their business. In 1998, we had the master settlement agreement of the tobacco industry, which had been sued by the states because the states realized that they were putting out more money to treat tobacco-related diseases through their Medicaid programs than they were able to bring in with taxes. And as a consequence, they sued the industry and tried to hold it accountable. The 1998 settlement revealed through the discovery process just how much the tobacco industry depended on legalizing, excuse me, addicting children. The Ligit Group, for example, and you can find hundreds of these examples in the Legacy Foundation's database. The Ligit Group said, if you are really and truly not going to sell cigarettes to children, you're going to be out of business in 30 years. Laura Lard said, the base of our business is the high school student. Despite agreeing to stop marketing to kids, the tobacco industry tripled its advertising and marketing budget between 1998 and five years later, investing some 70% of its $15 billion a year on price discounts so our customers can afford our product, meaning children. The industry continuously creates new products, not yet regulated by FDA, to attract children. This is one of many examples. So far, cigars are not under the purview of FDA and the industry is developing cigars and cigarellas, excuse me, in many wonderful flavors attractive to children, strawberry, white grape, apple, etc. The alcohol industry does the same thing. Each day, almost 5,000 kids under age 16 had their first drink of alcohol, again because the industry is coming after them with flavored products and other kinds of products that entice children to engage in the behavior. Will a commercial marijuana industry do the same thing? It already has. This is one of the products coming out of Colorado. Dixie elixirs in fruit flavored drinks, sparkling red currant, sparkling blueberry, sarsaparilla, etc. You have to ask yourself, what do you want to do? I'm going to keep showing you other products that are coming out of the medical marijuana states as we go through the rest of the slides. It's critical to understand the research and there is huge scientific consensus on this shows that availability drives use. And as availability increases, so will use, especially by youth, addiction, school failures, auto crashes, mental illness, and other public health and safety problems. This, by the way, is a marijuana infused chocolate chip cookie for sale in some of the medical marijuana stores. We think that there are three marijuana policy options. These are two more products, Jolly Ranchers and Cromdike ice cream bars. The first is to adjust our current marijuana laws to improve them by replacing the incarceration of low level marijuana users with assessment, treatment and social services to use the laws to help people become unaddicted. Why is this important? Because first, it charts a middle road between incarceration and legalization, but it also is the best way we have of holding down the number of kids who engage in marijuana use. The medical marijuana issue is one of enormous confusion that has taken us back, in my view, to the pre-FDA days, where anybody can make a medicine and claim that it has that it can cure any kind of disease even though there's no scientific evidence to show that. Colorado will not begin testing marijuana for contaminants until later this year, and there's now a group that received New Haven trying to develop ways to detect contaminants in marijuana, finding such things as mold, mildew, pesticides, E. coli and other contaminants. Many of these kinds of products are being infused into foods and there are no controls over whether this is good for you or not, at this point at least. So recreational marijuana, we believe, national families in action believe that we should not do that because we cannot think of a single way that will prevent use from increasing, particularly among children. However, if Congress were to go there, we would call for a legalization model based on David Kessler's model for the tobacco industry. He said after eight years as head of FDA of fighting to try to gain control of regulating tobacco and losing that battle, he said, my understanding of the industry's power finally forced me to see that the solution to the smoking problem rests with the bottom line, prohibiting the tobacco companies from continuing to profit from the sale of a deadly addictive drug. These profits are inevitably used to promote that same addictive product and to generate more sales. Dr. Kessler was trying to provide a powerful, 150-year-old commercial, addictive drug industry. He was trying to bring it to an end. If we apply his model to marijuana, we could prevent another one from starting. So what would a Kessler model look like? First of all, it would make public health the centerpiece of marijuana control. It would charter a tightly regulated non-profit corporation and by non-profit public health becomes key. In my state, in Georgia, I'm sorry to tell you that we have just passed the most extreme gun rights bill in the nation. And it was lobbied for by the National Rifle Association, a non-profit organization whose budget is $256 million and that buys a lot of votes in state legislatures. So this non-profit would have to be governed by a public health model and a public health board and a public health mission. Use the money from sales to underwrite only manufacturing and distribution costs. All other revenues would fund enforcement, medical research, treatment programs to prevent youth use and evaluation to measure what is actually happening. Marijuana would be tested for contaminants based on federal standards for research grade marijuana and THC levels. We would ban all forms of marijuana edibles and other processed forms such as hand lotions, creams, soft drinks, oils and waxes which are now testing out at 75% THC or higher and people are beginning to overdose on those higher levels of THC. Not dye, but overdose. Showing up in emergency rooms. Ban all advertising and marketing. I like Mark's way of doing that. That would be sensible. Package marijuana in child-proof plain containers displaying only a brand name and health warning. Control distribution to prevent sale to children and to adolescents. And finally, and I think most importantly, include an exit strategy in the law to repeal legalization if use and problems become unsustainable. Thank you. Whoops, I'm sorry. I have one more slide. Allowing a corporate takeover of marijuana will result in unnecessary increases in use, unnecessary increases in addiction, unnecessary school failures among youth, unnecessary deaths from marijuana-related driving, unnecessary rises in mental illness and additional unnecessary public health and safety problems. Now I'm done. Thank you. Thank you everybody. Thank you, Paul. It's great to be here. I am Jonathan Roush of the Brookings Institution. I hate to disagree with my good friend Paul Glastres, but one thing I am not is a leading expert on marijuana policy which is one reason I'm batting clean up. I'm new to this debate having come at it from the gay marriage debate and years of study of public policy and a whole lot of spheres. And although that brings disadvantages in terms of depth of expertise, it also brings some advantages I think in terms of seeing the debate with fresh eyes. And I have to tell you among the public policy debates that I have explored this is not one of the better managed. There is a lot of hysteria, a lot of hype, a lot of dogmatic certainty about what's going to happen. I think the best advice that I've heard is from my niece who at the time was three years old who said everybody please calm down. I think actually the news is pretty good. I'll be seated in the middle during the panel. I am a militant moderate and I think in fact moderate outcomes are a pretty reasonable thing to expect. Let me just for a few minutes pull the camera back before I bear down specifically on the topic today of commercialization. There is actually a lot of good news in the marijuana debate right now. A lot of reasons not to think our hair should be on fire. One is that there is a growing consensus for change after 40 years of failure and that is a very good thing. That gives us something to work with for a change. Another is that it is extremely easy to improve on the present policy. Almost anything you do is better than the present policy. Eisenhower was asked what Nixon had done to contribute to the Vice President Nixon to the administration what his accomplishments had been over the past eight years in 1960 he replied if you give me a week I might think of something if you give me a week I might think of something good about what we have now but I might actually not. Good news number three getting implementation right on this is difficult. It is just difficult. Okay. But the good news getting the process right is very very easy as public policy debates go. What you need to do is try some different things in some different places in different ways and experiment with them and try to learn from those things and improve policy as you go along that is the only way to figure this out and that appears to be exactly what we are going to do under the natural course of political events. That is not alarming I think that is the only way forward in fact. Finally something else that makes this a bit easier is that there are really only two credible alternatives from here that we can do right now and they are both pretty well understood at this point. Actually there are three models I think probably the most interesting model maybe the best would be a government monopoly on the distribution of marijuana. Mark Kleinman has proposed that there is a whole lot to be said for that Uruguay is doing something like that unfortunately in the United States because of federal law and treaty obligations that is out of the question right now so that leaves two models and you have already heard about both. One is decriminalization which Maryland is in the process of doing if I understand correctly and the second is regulated legalization which is what Colorado and Washington state are doing. These two things are not as different as you may have heard they are not polar opposites in fact they are quite similar both involved very large regulatory regimes a lot of controls on this market with criminal sanctions for people who break the rules criminal sanctions don't go away under either of these schemes in fact in some respects they become more important. The main difference between decriminalization and regulated legalization is who does the distribution of marijuana. Is that done illegally in a black market by criminals or is that done legally by commercial enterprises those are indeed two very very different paths forward. You know that's not the world's easiest choice but I would argue in fact I'm less scared of commercialization than a lot of people are I'm certainly concerned about it but I'd like to point out let's not forget commercialization has some significant advantages one of those is that when big companies market stuff you know who to address you know who to write to and you know who to legislate about if they start messing it up and that's very important to have an addressable responsible entity and by and large big corporations are pretty responsible when it comes to following law now that isn't to say we like what they do all the time or we like their lobbying operations and everything else but we know where to find them and that is certainly not true it doesn't remind us that the illegal system is also pretty darn good at marketing especially to children children try this stuff all the time we know that right in fact not only does the illegal system market to children it uses children to market to children something that even Anheuser-Busch does not do so there is no shortage of marketing and illegal commercialization that goes on with decriminalization finally I'd argue that with commercialization you do have an alternative that you don't have with illegal marketing and that is regulation and here again there is in my opinion some good news which is we have models for that I would argue I may disagree with Sue on this we can discuss this I would argue those models are actually relatively successful in the real world given the alternative there are two or kind of three depending how you count one is industry self-regulation which is what the gambling industry does one is a hybrid some of both which is what goes on in the alcohol industry which is in fact regulated in terms of marketing and the third is tobacco which I think is the most interesting the most applicable to marijuana and is worth thinking the hardest about in the gambling market 1999 congress struck down a federal ban on gambling ads on TV and since then the industry set up its own sort of self-regulatory guidelines and councils it's a voluntary code of conduct that provisions ban for example touting financial or personal success from gambling using symbols or celebrities designed to appeal to minors placing ads in media with an audience primarily of minors featuring college athletes or anyone who appears too young to gamble now this stuff isn't perfect but it is true that you don't turn on the TV or look at the newspaper and see tons and tons of ads you know go out and gamble unless they're by the government interesting about that isn't it so that is not wholly unsuccessful alcohol well look alcohol is a huge market the idea that somehow you can repress marketing of this to anybody kids or anybody else it's just not going to happen but alcohol is regulated labels are regulated by the alcohol and tobacco tax in trade bureau those people cannot put health claims on their labels that's why these labels tend to look so stark the industry otherwise is self-regulated by the beer institute the distilled spirits council the wine institute they have guidelines and we can argue about how well that works the guidelines restrict advertising to markets that are 70% adult or more in 2008 the FTC did a report and found that more than 90% of ad impressions in the alcohol marketing were in fact meeting the 70% standard now there's flaws in this you know that's certainly not perfect sports sponsorships are allowed we also the Clydesdale ad and the Super Bowl but this is not a perfect world so that's maybe not a terrible model and remember that alcohol is more than one industry if marijuana comes out looking more like wine for example and less like beer then I think we'd say that's actually a pretty good outcome then you have tobacco tobacco is directly applicable to marijuana tobacco is a drug cannabis obviously is a drug in 2009 which is very recent history enough so we don't have to talk too much about you know gridlock in congress being a new phenomenon since then congress passed the tobacco control act and this is a very robust system of regulation on the commercialization and marketing of tobacco let me read you some of what this does the FDA sets product standards and reviews all new products it's interesting that the products marketed to children that Sue showed us were not mainstream products under FDA control so that's a loophole but that is not the main regulatory regime there are nine specific warning messages that must be equally and randomly displayed on packages they must cover at least half the packages no flavored cigarettes no claims of reduced harm without prior FDA approval only face-to-face sales are allowed with a few limited exemptions limits on color and design of packaging and advertisements there is a lawsuit now on an as applied basis to that but it's fairly narrow the sponsorship of sporting events or entertainment events is banned free samples are banned claims of reduced harm like light and low and mild are banned without FDA order font colors are limited to black and white ingredients must be disclosed the FDA has a center for tobacco products that is solely in charge of implementing this I could go on and on this is a regulatory system that has done most of what Sue wants to do and about as much I would argue is as humanly possible I've sometimes heard it said look one you legalize marijuana there's no stopping the first amendment there's no way you can stop these guys from advertising this stuff well tobacco is here to prove otherwise the other nice thing about the tobacco control act is the supreme court has upheld it with as I say the exception of an as applied challenge going on right now so all of these models exist one of them is clearly I think indisputably applicable one of them is in place right now I think we actually have some pretty robust options for dealing with commercialization that isn't to say that we'll get it right but it is to say that it is certainly not necessarily true we're going to get this wrong thank you Jonathan thank you panel I'd like to invite you all up to sit with us and we'll have a little discussion amongst ourselves a little moderated discussion about what we've heard and then we're going to open it up to you I know I see some faces here that I know and I want to make sure that everybody can ask some questions of the staff of the panel so are our mics on are we good here I'm going to move over so let me first say I am just delighted at the level of detail and expertise in this in this discourse I learned a ton and more confused now than I was when I started which is always a good sign that you've confronted some expertise and facts that you hadn't before let me pose the first question and that is I think that we have among three if not four of the panelists agreement that in theory if we're going to have legalization at all the best way forward would be a government monopoly of the product I know Alice does not agree but I sense that that's something all the three of you would agree with or concede we live in an era where you know the public can't imagine the government doing anything right yet if I go to buy a broker in Maryland or Pennsylvania or Utah or any number of states I have to go to a ABC store an alcohol what is it alcohol beverages control so it's a government store only in Montgomery County that's right and even Montgomery County has some loopholes because there's a few stores where the kids by the way go to to get their alcohol I know this having kids in Montgomery County um this is something that we've had had in America for 70-80 years since the end of prohibition um what's wrong with and why can't we have marijuana sold by governments through government stores um limited in the types of products that it sells no fruit flavored drinks no waxes and uh hand solutions with a price that's set as Mark said at least at the current price um and a limit basically no marketing why wouldn't that solve the problem of making sure that marijuana is available for adults who want it and would restrict why wouldn't that be the best way to restrict um the inevitable increase in use and I'll start it's it's question for Allison right so uh government office has a lot to say as John pointed out we do have a treaty obligation that's in the way of that I would say withdraw from the treaty and re-exceed with a reservation I just don't take that one very seriously other than that I don't see a downside of letting this be publicly operated well let me then follow up and ask how do you make that happen in your piece that the federal government should somehow make that happen mechanically how do you do that mechanically and I want to disagree a little bit with Jonathan that we're on a cheerful track at the moment um a lot of the stuff we'd like to do like government monopoly can't be done by the states as long as the controlled substances act as in place because the state of Maryland could not tell its employees to commit a federal felony which selling marijuana is so the state store option is not available under the existing controlled substances act once California legalizes in 2016 which it almost certainly will and we have a multi-billion dollar commercial cannabis industry the prospects of rolling over that industry to retrofit a public monopoly it seems to me are very slim on the other hand if there are a bill in congress next year to say any state that wants to legalize can legalize and it's actually legal not just kind of tolerated by the federal government but only if it has a state store system I can imagine advocates of cannabis legalization saying well it's not what I really want but it's better when we got now um and I thought I could imagine people on the on the anti-drug side saying well it's not what we really want but it's better what we're going to get um but at the moment there's no such movement but that's what I propose I propose a bill that says you can legalize any state that wants to legalize under the following conditions um and you know and make that the national framework policy so not have the congress dictate what every state should do have the congress dictate what every state may do the current system of having cannabis quasi-hemi-demi-semi-legal in some states is really just not a very good system so treasure department just issued guidance that said to the banks well yes actually it is a felony to handle an account for a marijuana business but we probably won't get you if you do that really this is this is not satisfactory I actually think we need to if we're going to do it legally then we have to do it legally and the system of issuing federal state licenses to commit federal felonies is at best a transitional mechanism it's not something we should be happy with and remember everybody in that business is completely at risk of president huckabee's attorney general inciting them in 2017 for stuff they're doing now that the current justice department guidance says they won't be prosecuted for it's a crazy system all right well Allison as the resident questioner of this government stores idea I'd like your thoughts about it well I think we overestimate the potential benefits of a government monopoly and I'd like to step back and say first we need to define our terms if we're talking about a government monopoly are we talking about stores state stores was a government monopoly for liquor we had state operated stores but we weren't a government monopoly for the products that were in the stores right and so if you have private entities producing the products we'll be marketing those products let me interrupt there so that's my proposal to get away from the commercial free speech doctorate if every every grower of cannabis every processor of cannabis has to be a vendor to the state you can write the marketing restriction into the vendor agreement we could have an argument about first amendment jurisprudence around that question I'm going to set aside the legal technicalities I mean first just so we all know there is no first amendment of marijuana right now because it is an illegal product under federal law there's some potential debate about whether or not corollary state first free speech constitutional protections would apply but as long as marijuana remains illegal under the federal law there's no first amendment protection of advertising so setting all that aside just as a policy goal if you're talking about having the government produce the marijuana that's going to be sold then you should be looking at places where that's happening right now like the United States which has a government monopoly on the medical marijuana not medical marijuana but marijuana that's produced for medical and scientific research I don't think it would be very difficult for you to find people that would say that the quality is not going to actually have an impact on the black market I think that's true with Canada's experiment with the government being involved in growing marijuana you have to take into consideration whether or not consumers are going to be satisfied with the product that is being produced by the government if you're looking though just at the stores being the government monopoly you're talking about what are the impacts of retail really when the government monopoly is in place for liquor stores you're talking about whether or not the clerks are responsible for ensuring that they're not selling to underage people where the stores are located how convenient it is if the hard alcohol is going to be next to the Wheaties in the safe way or if it's going to be a building that you have to travel to so that you're sort of taking away some of the ease and accessibility all of those policy choices are available in a private market and they're exactly the policy choices that we made in initiative 502 we forced the stores to be stand-alone stores we gave the regulatory agency the specific mandate to decide how many stores there could be where they should be and we wrote into the law that the policy considerations that had to animate the choices were that it has to be there has to be adequate availability to meet the market but not promote the market so I just think that when we imagine that government control over marijuana is going to achieve something that we can't achieve through writing a better law that we're not necessarily facing that on any good data well let me pick up on that and go to something that my friend Jonathan talked about which is his sense that things are are happening in a beneficial way as we do the state by state approach and I think most people would agree that the way Washington has regulated it's marijuana it's nascent marijuana markets is as good as anyone has thought of right now it's a very very tight regulatory system but what assurance do we have that every state will be as responsible as Washington let me give you an example in the state just to the south of Oregon there was a referendum on the ballot to legalize marijuana and it would be controlled by a group that would be itself controlled by marijuana producers it didn't pass though it came relatively close and what you did what you had what the voters of Oregon almost did what they call regulatory capture directly into the regulatory process except they didn't they didn't but they came close enough Colorado and Washington are both fairly responsible if you're looking for assurances that states legislatures and the public will always do the right thing you're in the wrong city that's not how this country works you try stuff and eventually you count on the good sense of the public it takes a little time but to make decent choices I don't think we actually know which is going to be better as between for example a regulated marketplace in a government monopoly what I really wish would happen is that Congress would pass a bill allowing regulated monopolies to be tried and then we would find out unfortunately Congress is not about to do that government monopoly Sue you've your organization has a position of being against legalization you know just as a matter of policy is it your sense that the supporters of your position can but you've also said that if we're going to have legalization you would a very tightly regulated system is it your sense that that's where the public is that to John's point that the public knows once this freedom but once it carefully regulated and kept out of the hands of children is that where the public is and is that do you have some faith going forward as Jonathan does that's a difficult question I'm not at all certain I think that there are a number of people in this country who do not want to see legalization but what we are seeing is the excitement in the press that has picked up on legalization we're seeing polls that say more than half want legalization but I'm not sure those polls are asking all the right questions I would like to ask some more like do you want a marijuana shop in your community where your kids can go I think that the inevitability of marijuana legalization is not as strong as we might suspect and I'll give you two examples one states that the marijuana policy project concentrated on to legalize this session have rejected legalization Maine and yesterday New Hampshire the New Hampshire House voted down legalization after having approved a legalization bill earlier in the session so I think that there are I don't think it's such a done deal that we suspect it may be more of a done deal that I'm comfortable with but I'm not so sure it's inevitable here's what I'm sure of unless somebody who doesn't like the idea of full-scale commercial legalization is prepared to propose something short of that if the opponents of legalization keep saying no no no no no no no no then what we're going to get is the alcohol model and I have to disagree with Jonathan I think all of the bells and whistles don't change the fact that the natural legal price of cannabis is close to zero and even stiff taxes on a percentage basis as they have in Washington let alone the light taxes they have in Colorado but even a 40% tax 40% of nothing is nothing and the natural price of a joint is pennies I don't see anything that's going to keep us from getting to super cheap cannabis and at that point two interjections one on that is tobacco is also very cheap but New York taxes $6 a pack many states are much lower and much too low but I don't understand why it's a given that we go to the alcohol model and not the tobacco model Paula on your question there's actually polling on where the public is on advertising 80% do not want to see an open advertising market in marijuana and that's true even among those who favor legalization so there's a very strong consensus against marketing and for both of those reasons I just don't accept this notion that once you legalize you're suddenly going to be in a world where it's like Lego marketing you know it's a joke camel I just went out in New York City which has the highest taxes somewhere between a third and a half of all the cigarettes sold are smuggled not from Clinton grad but from Virginia and so a state by state system with different state levels of taxation is going to let the lowest tax state set the price for the whole country because cannabis is much more smuggable than tobacco because it's much more compact an ounce of cannabis is $300 a pack of cigarettes weighs about an ounce and New York State has a hard time collecting $8 a pack so the notion that we can take a commodity's natural price is zero and with a patchwork of state regulations keep it near its current $10 a gram I think that's for affection I think it goes to $3 a gram I think we're going to see a very substantial increase in consumption even over and above what you get simply from legal availability and I don't see anything on the agenda that's going to stop that and as enthusiastic as people are even the folks who are now voting against cannabis legalization when Governor Norquist tells them that higher taxes are bad in Colorado the Republican legislature all of whom were against cannabis legalization when it came time to vote on taxation all voted for the lower tax because taxes are bad which is the reason if I were running a state system I wouldn't do it as taxation I would do it as quantity limitation and an auction on production rights it's not a tax gets you the same place so this is my cannabis cap and trade but I just don't see any reason to think that we're not currently on a track to have very cheap cannabis and if it's very cheap it almost doesn't matter how it leads marketed I want to open up to the folks in the audience if you've got some questions and we have a microphone so please this gentleman right here we can start state your name and your affiliation affiliation if you got one this is David Borden with stopthedrugwar.org and the Drug War Chronicle newsletter the question has to do with the idea that marijuana could be a substitute for use of alcohol people like me have tended to assume that it is people like Mark have warned that we don't really know based on the evidence maybe it's a compliment maybe it's a substitute for some demographics and a compliment in others suppose that with the better data we are going to have soon it turns out that marijuana is more or less a substitute including in the groups that are people that are most vulnerable in that case could a commercialized industry even a robust one with lower prices be a good thing as an indirect means of reducing alcohol abuse with its greater public health consequences anybody absolutely the cross elasticity with alcohol is the big wild card in the cannabis legalization debate and if it turns out to be a strong substitute then more availability is just playing a good thing it's been pointed out to me and I hadn't thought about this that whether they're compliments or substitutes is partly a question of sort of pharmacological and sociological fact partly malleable to policy so for example on the parapair driving question I would like to see a law that says if you test positive for cannabis you have a BAC of zero for driving encourage people to think of cannabis and alcohol as things to do separately not together but look you're completely correct but let me flip it over if it turns out they're in fact compliments either simultaneously or over time if getting habituated to heavy cannabis use a heavy drinker later in life if that's true are you prepared to reconsider your position that we should legalize cannabis okay the lady in the very back there thank you good morning my name is jasmine tyler from the open society foundations I really have appreciated this panel this morning but one thing that has been missing is the conversation around the cost the human cost of marijuana prohibition and the folding in of african-american and latino entrepreneurs into the corporatization of the new burgeoning marijuana industry so I wonder if you can talk about that a little any of the panelists I could talk about the first half of that and say it's important I think one of the places where I would differ with sue and with a lot of people in this debate is there's a lot of single entry bookkeeping that goes on where you look at one half of the equation but not the other and it is true that marijuana consumption is bad for children but it's also very bad for children to have your dad in jail while you're growing up and then have an arrest record and not be able to get a job so there are a lot of costs on both sides I don't disagree with that at all I can talk briefly to the issue about engaging communities of color that have been impacted disproportionately and so significantly by marijuana law enforcement in this opportunity to now build wealth in their communities to actually be part of this new marketplace and it was something that at the ACLU of Washington state we worked very hard during the rulemaking process to try to engage these communities in the rulemaking process so that they could have an impact on what the market would look like and also to provide some public education about how they could actually get involved in the market and I will tell you that it was a challenge my personal take on it is that we did a really good job during the 1980s of demonizing anybody that would think about going into this business and I think especially with communities of color who wound up being the face of the war on drugs during the 1980s there's even this level of shame and embarrassment to think that oh now I'm actually going to fulfill the stereotypes that were used to perpetuate the war on drugs during the 80s so it's been very difficult but we have started to make some inroads and are engaging with communities to say don't let this opportunity go by the people who have suffered the most should have the opportunity to participate and I guess from a sociological standpoint it's another reason why I might be a little bit reluctant to turn this over to a government monopoly let's let the people in the communities that have been impacted most by marijuana law enforcement have an opportunity to benefit from the new regulatory market I think the best advice I could give to minority entrepreneurs about the marijuana business is stay the hell away from it everybody thinks they're going to get rich in this business I think the people who are running the venture funds are going to get rich fleecing the investors I think the investors are going to lose their shirt everybody assumes that it's going to be a legal market with a big market and you're going to sell it at $10 a gram at $3 a gram the people who are putting $2 million into setting up a store are going to go broke and so I'd hate to see minority entrepreneurs get trapped into this one the way minority homeowners got trapped into buying houses in 2006 I have to push back on that because somebody is going to make money somebody is going to make money and right now frankly it's a lot of young white men that are getting into the game and yes a lot of them are going to lose their shirts but some of them are going to make money and frankly if we want to have a good impact on youth in communities of color we should have their community members running the stores that are selling these products we should not have the white kids from the privileged neighborhoods going into the communities and selling them the substance we should have the neighbors running these businesses I completely disagree that minority entrepreneurs should stay away from this business you need to be shaping it you need to make sure that it doesn't look like alcohol and tobacco where alcohol and tobacco have a history of going and targeting minority communities and selling their products to them you can't shape the industry unless you are in it and at the table I agree there I have another view and that is that if we are completely honest with ourselves the drug problem is not why we have unequal enforcement of the laws it's much broader than that and until we're willing to deal with that recognize it and change it I don't think that I think we're missing the mark to say it's only the drug problem and shame on us we need to change that because ultimately we'll be who buy up all the broke hippies in Mendocina County and roll them up into one giant marijuana company and they're the ones that start advertising on super bowls and so forth or maybe the tobacco industry that's right there's already a venture fund out there working on rolling up the small operators but the truth is we don't know what kind of market this is going to shape up again if it's like the wine market in a very different world than if it's like the beer market right and the question is what is going to be the market depends on what it looks like the Gallo part of the wine market or the Chateau Mouton or Shield part of the wine market I'm not I guess I'm the only one that doesn't think that the alcohol and tobacco companies are going to get into this I think they have negative brand equity for potential cannabis consumers involvement with cannabis would damage their brand equity with the consumers of their existing products I think will have substantial outfits maybe it'll be analyzed it depends partly on whether they're either regulatory barriers to entry or branding barriers to entry this could wind up being like tea you know it's a commodity product not very expensive not very glamorous and not terribly profitable I can't imagine this could be again unless there's somehow regulatory barriers to entry hard for me to see how you can make big profits growing this stuff interesting right here this gentleman Hi I'm Steve Fox with the National Cannabis Industry Association well disappointed there actually isn't corporate representation on this panel to talk about what we're actually doing also as a author of amendment 64 in Colorado and involved in the implementation there I would quibble with the idea that Colorado is sloppy things are actually pretty tightly regulated restrictions on packaging labeling and taxes coming in and so on everything going very well my question actually follows up on what Dave asked earlier and for Professor Kleinman you know marijuana is less harmful than alcohol you suggest that substitution will be a good thing you even challenge saying if it turns out the other way would you change your mind about legalization so the question is why shouldn't the industry be able to advertise freely and market marijuana as a substitute for alcohol so that we can actually diminish alcohol use in the country have people be encouraged to use marijuana instead and have a positive public health impact if it were true that cannabis was substitute for alcohol there would be an argument for having lower taxes and looser regulations on cannabis at the moment there is precisely zero evidence of that and if NCIA wants to start running anti-booze ads I'm entirely on their side my understanding is that there have been discussions with discus about us all being anti-prolhibitions together and I expect the industry to do whatever makes it the most money I expect not to be consistent with public interest I would also like to address one thing that you said and that is that colorado is not a tightly regulated market it's trying to be that but the colorado legalized medical marijuana in the year 2000 and two state reports that came out in the end of last year suggest that the regulatory system is awful so I'm going to have to follow you around when you go to congress with those two reports we might want to remember the regulatory system right now in illegal states is also extremely bad as in much worse than colorado in washington right this gentleman right here yeah good morning I don't have any particular affiliation I just would like to pose a question to the entire panel maybe Mr. Kleinman in particular I assume we're running on the assumption that what we'd want to do with a legal market is to diminish the size and the consequences of an illegal market now I'm wondering if the extent that some of you suggest the government would directly regulate even through monopoly the business wouldn't that then create multiple incentives for there to be a black market running concurrently to the federal market marketing for children who might want to circumvent the registration and quota regime that you suggest so I'll just put that question out there so that's a good question requires a slightly extended answer if I may you got a distinguish between the short run and the long run right in the short run the regulatory system in washington has to compete with an illicit market and with the unregulated untaxed medical market and that puts an upper bound on how tight the regulations can be also it seems to me puts a premium on law enforcement right the day before you legalize cannabis if you arrest a marijuana dealer all you're doing is creating a niche for a new marijuana dealer not really reducing the supply of marijuana at all the day after you legalize if you arrest an illegal dealer you can push his customers toward the legal market so paradoxically the benefits of cannabis law enforcement against illegal production and sale go up with legalization now they don't go up for very long because after a couple of years there won't be an illegal market any more than there's a substantial moonshine whiskey market there are lots of states with as it's been pointed out with state source for alcohol none of them have big moonshining problems because in this is Alison's point people want the legal product it's better, it's cheaper, it's labeled and you don't have to sneak around to get it so unless the illegal market has big advantages the legal market is just going to wipe it out but it's going to require a little help from law enforcement to get there once you've wiped out the illegal market then you can be more aggressive on both taxation and regulation I think the idea that we should ban the concentrates in the legal market at the moment would simply set up an illegal concentrate market the only thing we have to admit and this really goes along with Sue's point there's not very much we can do to keep something that's available to adults away from kids we can keep the state licensed stores from selling to the kids we do a pretty good job of that with alcohol that doesn't do very much to keep them from getting alcohol and in fact, if minors are going to get cannabis, which they are I'd rather have them get processed and tested and labeled cannabis diverted from the state system than strictly illegal cannabis so I'd work hard to keep them from buying directly from the state stores and admit the fact the shoulder tapping market's going to happen Steve Davenport at Carnegie Mellon's got a paper working on this that I think is going to be a very important document the gentleman back here thanks Amanda thanks I'm Eric Sterling I wear a lot of different marijuana related hats and I want to say what a terrific panel this has been how much I've learned from everybody and how excellent the discourse has been my question is what are your suggestions about what kinds of conversations families should have about marijuana use to discourage young people from using marijuana in either the current national discourse in favoring it and then in the post legalization environment I'm on the Montgomery County Alcohol and Drug Abuse Advisory Council and I think we're struggling to figure out what should we be saying in schools what should families be saying if the old B.S. is no longer valid so do you want to sounds like a question coming to me I think that it's important to understand that as the country accepts marijuana first as a medicine and more recently for recreational use in two states that that message that's coming to children is it's a safe drug gee mom it's medicine why can't I use it I'm going to use it anyway so the question about alcohol and tobacco is the same as the question about marijuana whether it's legal or not and any other addictive drug you have to be honest with your children and you have to be certain the research shows us you have to be certain that you make a protective cocoon around your children and you set guidelines for which there are consequences if they're broken that's the most effective way a family can protect their children the second most effective way is to get together with the other families the other parents of your child's closest friends and make a larger cocoon for those children we don't tolerate alcohol use we don't tolerate marijuana use whether it's legal or not we don't tolerate tobacco use for kids who are underage it's not good for you it will hurt your brain it will hurt your development and as long as you can get a peer group to reinforce that message with children you have your best chance of protecting them but make no mistake legalizing marijuana gives the wrong message to kids and what we're seeing is increases in marijuana use since the discussion about that began in the early 1990s I saw that on your website I've just got to call you on that because to say that the reason the drug war failed since the early 90s is that too many people have criticized it and that we should all be quieter and more accepting of it doesn't make sense that's the status quo it's failing I would love it if more folks would just recognize that in terms of what to say about kids I'm not a parent so I don't really know but I come from a different tradition so tolerance message is often counterproductive because it teaches kids this stuff must be magic I come from a Jewish tradition where we had alcohol very very bad tasting alcohol every Friday night as part of a family ritual and one thing that that does is familiarize you with this make this sort of routine part of your life so where the other kids are just you know drinking up a storm because gosh I must be grown up if I can do this illicit thing we're going that is so boring so I'm not really sold on this zero tolerance don't discuss it in message I think it's a failure and if I could I'd like to just add to that because I agree with Sue about the aspect of building the community around the children and expanding that but the messages are so important not only is the zero tolerance perhaps creating this forbidden fruit dynamic but it's not credible and if we lose credibility with our children we've lost it all parents and I am a parent parents are the ones that children are looking up to as long as they possibly can until they get to be teens and then they proactively push back I hear so I'm really looking forward to that but if you establish that relationship of trust and not bs-ing and also expectation but the expectation should be ones that respect the child's intelligence the expectation should be I want you to wait and here's why I can give you the brain science but then the other piece that I want to add to what both of you are saying is that we ought to not kid ourselves that the truth will set us free we ought to look at what's actually been affected with tobacco which is not necessarily just focusing on the science of tobacco but it's focusing on what teenagers care about so this makes you smelly and people won't have sex with you that works yeah so let's spend some money on what actually works regardless of whether it's scientifically accurate and have the science there have the truth but be strategic as well let me just say that your bad tasting wine on Friday nights is really quite a different scenario from what kids face today with alcohol for example where they're exposed to it by their friends by parents who allow it to happen and allow other people's children to come to their home and serve alcohol to them even though they're underage that's really the pressure that you're fighting it will be the same and it is the same with marijuana and it's the same with any addictive drug you have to set standards and you have to set guidelines and know until you've grown up is a very good message and the science supports that you're new to our field so I'll give you some science lessons but here's another science lesson the American Jewish population has an alcohol prevalence near one everybody who's even ethnically Jewish has used alcohol and as Jonathan says used it very early and the prevalence of alcohol abuse disorder is relatively small in that population there are other subpopulations in the U.S. with much higher rates of abstinence from alcohol and much higher rates of alcohol abuse so I think we should be focusing not on which substances kids use but on whether they lose control of their behavior and I think modern prevention science is all around self command not around specific risk behaviors so look if a family wants to say no alcohol for you until you're 21 that's a reasonable guideline I don't think it's the only guideline and I'm not sure it's the best we've got about five more minutes and I want to get some more questions in so let's do three questions sort of a lightning round here one right here please keep your question real short so we can get a lot in my name is Bryce Pardo with the Organization of American States and there are two things that I didn't hear in this panel that could focus on the the industry the cannabis industry was home grow and market integration obviously Colorado and Washington have very different views on that and Uruguay as well who includes home grow so I wanted to see what your opinion was in terms of the cost and benefits of that pros and cons okay the young man there there you go just a follow up to the gentleman's question over there and Allison's comment price and availability are really only part of the it wasn't working earlier price and availability are really only part of the equation cigarettes for example are much cheaper and much more available to children than marijuana and yet fewer kids actually use cigarettes than marijuana and sort of related to that a lot of the sort of concern over the corporate takeover of marijuana seems to be just disdain toward the idea of people getting rich selling marijuana and so rather than artificially inflating the price of marijuana and focusing on supply reduction if the natural cost of marijuana is zero then let it be zero and focus on demand reduction there's every reason to believe based on our experience over the last 20 years with cigarettes that's a much more effective approach and this gentleman right here a few weeks ago they've got into how banks could provide banking services to marijuana related businesses I was curious where you see that going and if you think that will have any material impact moving away from the cash only business on legalization so we've got homegrown we've got the possibility that lowering the price to zero won't be a bad thing and we've got the banking issue you want to take out of those you're quite wrong about tobacco in fact the single most effective prevention technique for kids is to raise the price so they can't afford it and all of the research shows us that the more expensive it is the fewer children start or use that's correct but that has nothing to do with the price and taxes homegrown why is that not the way to go homegrown would have been an interesting alternative to commercial legalization altogether right you could have said nobody can produce it for sale but anybody can grow it and give it away tomatoes I think we're past that the problem with homegrown in a world where it's legal only in some states is that homegrown can be a cover for commercial production and I think it's very hard to get that under control we'll see what happens so Colorado and Washington give us the contrast cases Washington does not allow homegrown Colorado does and we'll see if the homegrown Colorado turns out to be a problem if it doesn't I've certainly got no objection to it laboratories of democracy Jonathan there we go can I piggyback on homegrown the only reason we didn't have homegrown in the Washington initiative because it didn't pull well we went with a very restricted hard alcohol model I also don't think homegrown is going to have that much of an impact we can homegrow we can homebrew beer, wine, whatever we prefer the convenience of a store I don't think homegrown has any impact on the market I also think that homegrown as a strategy for undermining the black market misses the point that the greatest concentration of demand is in urban environments where people live in apartments and they're not going to grow their own marijuana so if you you have to have the stores available I just don't think homegrown makes that much impact and banking? 10 seconds I think it's a great idea the Treasury is trying to get out of the way I think most banks won't accept the bait but most banks don't have to accept the bait all you need is some credit union prepared to play somebody will play this, will not now be in all cash business and that's a good thing and we have that in Washington State New America Credit Union and Spokane Valley is going to go forward with the FinCEN guidance and I agree with Mark once one or two credit unions goes folks thank you very very much what a great panel show your appreciation thank you all for coming thank you New America for hosting this thank you the C-SPAN audience we really appreciate it, bye bye now