FW: In 2 States, Corner Cannabis Store Nears Reality #drugpolicy

The New York Times
December 13, 2013

In 2 States, Corner Cannabis Store Nears Reality

By JACK HEALY and KIRK JOHNSON

DENVER - Starting early next year, any adult with a craving or curiosity
will be able to stroll into a strip mall or downtown shop in Colorado or
Washington State and do what has long been forbidden: buy a zip-lock bag of
legal marijuana.

After landmark votes made marijuana legal for recreational consumption,
users in these two states will no longer need doctors' notes or medical
reasons to buy the drug. Instead, they will simply show identification to
prove they are at least 21, and with the cautious blessing of state and
federal officials, they will be able to buy as much as an ounce of marijuana
and smoke it in their living rooms.

It is a new frontier of drug legalization, one that marks a stark turn away
from the eras of "Reefer Madness," zero tolerance and Just Say No warnings
about the dangers of marijuana. But it also raises questions about whether
these pioneering states will be able to regulate and contain a drug that is
still outlawed across most of the country - although medical marijuana can
be sold legally in 20 states and the District of Columbia. The end of the
prohibition of alcohol in the 1930s, by contrast, to which some historians
and legal scholars are comparing this moment, came all at once across the
nation.

On this never-traveled road, the outcome on many fronts is uncertain:
Supporters predict an economic boom in new business activity, cannabis
tourism and reduced public expense with fewer low-level drug offenders
clogging jails and courtrooms.

Elected officials, parents' groups and police chiefs worry that drug
traffickers will exploit the new markets, that more teenagers will take up
marijuana, and that two places with reputations for fresh air and clean
living will become known as America's stoner states.

Other states flirting with legalization are watching closely too, not least
for the expected windfall in state revenue in stiffly taxing something that
has never been taxed at all.

Referendum drives modeled on Colorado and Washington are already underway
for next year in Arizona, California, Oregon and Alaska, and others are
expected to follow in 2016. So the pressures to get it right the first time,
local and state officials said, are immense.

"We are floating in uncharted waters here," said Mayor Michael B. Hancock of
Denver, where 149 businesses have applied to sell or grow retail marijuana.

Consider, for example, the strangely altered new role of the police, who in
Washington are required to make sure all marijuana is of the legal,
state-licensed variety. That could make for more crackdowns on illegal
grow-and-sale operations, not fewer, a fact highlighted when federal agents
raided several dispensaries in Colorado last month, smashing glass and
hauling away hundreds of plants.

Practical questions about the legal, workaday drug trade have required reams
of rules and regulations to answer: Should it be specifically taxed?
Voters said yes, and in Washington even specified where the tax money should
be spent, with specific apportionments including the funding of academic
research about marijuana.

Can people give it away in public parks? No. Where can retailers set up
shop, and how can they advertise? Nowhere near schools, and not to children.
In Washington, even the size of a retailer's storefront name is
regulated: 1,600 square inches.

But most important, Colorado and Washington must show skeptical federal
authorities that they can control this new world of regulated marijuana, and
keep it from flowing to underage consumers, into other states or into the
grip of drug traffickers and violent cartels. Even as the Justice Department
announced in August that it would not block states from regulating
marijuana, it also warned that their enforcement rules "must be tough in
practice, not just on paper."

"We're already seeing a worst-case scenario emerging," said Kevin A.
Sabet, an opponent of legalization and the co-founder of Project SAM, Smart
Approaches to Marijuana. He said marijuana was already flowing from
dispensaries into the hands of teenage users, and he predicted the social
costs would only mount in the months ahead.

One corner of this new frontier is emerging in an industrial park on the
eastern fringes of Denver, where the Medicine Man dispensary is working to
be among the first wave of new retailers. The business, housed in a
converted spice factory, is expanding its growing operation from 5,000
plants to 11,000, sketching out plans to remodel the interior and placing
advertisements in golfing magazines, to appeal to potential customers.
Even the countercultural names of its marijuana - Cat Piss Romulan, for
example - will be softened.

"That's not something you want to take home," said Andy Williams, who owns
Medicine Man with his brother and mother. "Maybe we'll call it Midnight
Dream."

Under Colorado's rules, some shops will have to build separate entrances
and new walls to separate their medical business from their recreational
business. Medical customers - there are about 112,000 statewide - will pay a
lower sales tax than recreational buyers. And businesses will be required to
keep separate records and inventories.

Colorado residents will be able to buy an ounce at a time. Visitors will be
allowed a quarter-ounce. (Prices now range from $25 to $50 for an eighth of
an ounce.) Both legalizing states will allow adult out-of-state visitors to
buy and consume, but neither allows consumption in public, and both bar
transporting legal marijuana across state lines.

So far, no dispensaries in Colorado have cleared the final inspections and
obtained the final licenses to begin selling recreational marijuana.
Licenses in Washington will be issued as early as January, but the first
retail marijuana to sell will not be available until spring.

But even the wait itself underscores what is perhaps the biggest, yet
subtlest implication of legalization: What once seemed wild, dangerous and
radical to most Americans has become the stuff of state and local
bureaucracy.

Although the governors of Colorado and Washington both opposed legalizing
marijuana, once the voters had spoken, they and other state officials threw
themselves into setting up shop to make marijuana work. In Washington, the
State Liquor Control Board is in charge. In Colorado a commission presented
plans to the Legislature, and state and city agencies are now sifting
through applications.

"We know that we are under the microscope of experimentation here," said
Jack Finlaw, chief legal counsel to Colorado's governor, who helped develop
the state's new marijuana regulations. "Now the challenge is rolling it out
and making sure the rules are properly enforced."

That mainstream momentum, and its message that marijuana is part of ordinary
life, like a drink after work, is in turn spilling over into other states.
In October, a Gallup survey found that 58 percent of Americans favored
making marijuana legal, the strongest support in the poll's history.

"Those victories in Washington and Colorado transformed the legalization and
regulation of marijuana from an abstraction into a political reality,"
said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which
supports legal marijuana. "How do we morally justify arresting people and
locking them up when just across the border, or a few hundred miles away,
it's being treated more or less like alcohol?"

In Arizona, where people are gathering signatures to put legalization on
2014 ballots, organizers said a transplant from Washington who worked on the
initiative there, came with a resonant message of practical, proven
strategy: lose the tie dye and any green leafy symbols that might remind
anyone, anywhere, of Cheech and Chong or Bob Marley, and then, dressed well
and speaking politely, expand at every opportunity the constituency beyond
college students.

"Present a normal-type atmosphere, instead of a drug-use-type atmosphere,"
said John Howlett, 58, a former airline mechanic who volunteered in
Washington and has been working with Safer Arizona on its referendum drive
since his retirement there last year.

The mainstreaming extends to economics too. In Washington, about 1,700
applicants have filed for state licenses to grow, process or sell marijuana
since the application process began last month. In many cases - if only to
gauge by the names of applicants like Killer Grown Bud and Holy Smokes Farms
- the new entrepreneurs are marijuana enthusiasts whose interests predate
legalization.

But there are also people like Donald Burks. He's a 70-year-old farmer in
western Washington who said he has never tried marijuana and has no interest
in doing so now. He applied for a grower's license because he saw a market
for specialty seeds and starter plants - an agricultural niche he knows well
after 30 years farming.

"Every farmer I know is on the lookout for a new crop," he said. Mr. Burks
said he never imagined that marijuana would one day become an agricultural
crop, legal as parsnips, but he admits he's been wrong before.

"I didn't expect I'd see broccoli become a popular product either, and it
has," he said.


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/14/us/in-2-states-corner-cannabis-store-nears
-reality.html
--
A version of this article appears in print on December 14, 2013, on page
A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In 2 States, Corner Cannabis
Store Nears Reality.

--
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