11/2010: Prop 19--what is it good for?

[And by "it" I mean the initiative process]

Prop 19: is it time for legal pot? Well, yes, but that’s not really the question on Prop 19. The question is, is it good law? Figuring that out will go some distance to demarcate the bounds of good uses of the initiative process. Prop 19 legalizes pot but does a poor job of regulating it. Under it you can use and grow pot, and the regulation there seems reasonable–age limits, acreage limits. You can also sell it if you’re licensed, and therein the problems starts.
Prop 19 leaves much to be defined, specifically leaving local governments freedom to control, license, regulate, permit, tax the cultivation, processing, distribution, transportation, sale, and possession of pot (freely quoting from the text of the proposed law). That looks like a power vacuum waiting for a legislature to do something, like the recipe for the anarchy of a patchwork of local regulations. And that leaves me wondering, what’s wrong with that?

I complain time and again that legislating by initiative is micro managing by amateurs. Here is an example of the opposite extreme–providing broad outlines but leaving the details to the professionals, and here specifically leaving those details to them. What better use of the initiative process? No way are the voters gonna parse an initiatives to fully comprehend its nuances. Better is for the initiative to provide the broad brush strokes and for the legislature(s) to fill in the details. And this proposition does just that.

So, as long as I’m for legalizing pot, I should be for this prop. And I’m libertarian enough that I don’t think someone should go to jail for smoking pot (hmmm, isn’t the fine for having under an ounce of pot already just a tax?). But I’m left with one concern–drug testing in the workplace.

The prop says employers can’t discriminate against pot users if the use doesn’t impair their performance. Endorsements against Prop 19 say employers need more flexibility than that to ensure a drug-free workplace. Prop 19 gives the legislature the power to amend it, with some restrictions on amendments to one section, but not the section that addresses workplace drug testing. The same sort of argument applies to the DUI section, which some anti-19 endorsements also argued.

And on to the anarchy issue. The freedom we so cherish in the US implies anarchy. The term “anarchy” is just a pejorative way to express “freedom.” Anti-19 endorsements decry the anarchy this prop would produce, comparing it to the anarchy that resulted from allowing medical marijuana. I’m gonna say our legislatures have and are learning from that experience and are quickly finding out how to regulate legal pot. OK, that’s more of a hope than something I know, though I see local governments are turning their attention to figuring out how to improve control medical marijuana. Is that uncertainty enough to warrant voting against 19?

I don’t think so. I’m ready to tell the legislature(s) to figure out how to make pot pay for itself, rather than be a money pit for my tax dollars.

And with luck, future posts will deal with anarchy and sausage making and whether/why to trust the legislatures to make better law of the details than the general public.