Why Regulation Will Likely Keep Illegal Weed Dominant.

• Author: Henderson, David R.

Can Legal Weed Win?

By Robin Goldstein and Daniel Sumner

211 pp.; University of California Press, 2022

As more and more state governments legalize recreational use of marijuana--14 had done so by 2021--an obvious question to ask is, will the amount of legal marijuana sold and consumed eventually exceed the amount of illegal marijuana sold and consumed? Thinking through the economics, my answer would have been yes. Make it legal and the risk of producing and selling it falls. Those who continue to produce illegally face the risk of prosecution and confiscation. Legal marijuana, therefore, should have an advantage in the market.

But in Can Legal Weed Win? economist and lawyer Robin Goldstein of the University of California Cannabis Economics Group and agricultural economist Daniel Sumner of the University of California, Davis answer no. They argue that the heavy regulation of legally produced marijuana gives a leg up to illegal marijuana--or, as they call it in the book, "weed." They make their case by guiding the reader through the history of marijuana legalization and regulation, and by analyzing the basic economics of legal and illegal markets. I find their case persuasive.

Push for prohibition / The authors start by explaining why they use the word "weed" instead of "marijuana." They write, "We prefer a term used by buyers and sellers in real markets to a term used by government regulators." They had me at "government" and so I will adopt their usage.

In the book's first chapter, Goldstein and Sumner give a brief history of the legal status of weed. They note that in the 1800s it was completely legal in the United States. But in the early 1900s, governments started pushing the idea that weed was particularly harmful. It didn't take long for state governments to prohibit it, which they did long before the federal government entered the picture. Interestingly, California was the second state to prohibit weed, after Massachusetts.

Welcome to California / In 2000, a group of like-minded libertarians and I formed the Monterey, CA-based Foundation to End Drug Unfairness Policies (FEDUP) to advocate the legalization of all illegal drugs. Our main concern was not the availability or price of illegal drugs; only one of our group used them. Rather, our concern was the lives shattered by the government's drug war. People were being imprisoned for buying, producing, or selling illegal drugs and, because of the extensive government regulation of entry...