The benefits of unregulated pot: California's 'wild west' demonstrates the domesticating power of capitalism.

• Author: Beato, Greg

LAST SEPTEMBER the Washington State Liquor Control Board published a 43-page list of proposed guidelines for the sale of recreational marijuana. A few days later, Colorado issued an even longer set of rules, 136 densely packed pages in all.

In the realm of legal, commercialized cannabis, a new age is upon us: the age of pungent regulatory skunk. To prove how committed they are to freedom, personal choice, and the pursuit of herbally induced happiness, Washington and Colorado are imposing consumer purchase ceilings, retail sign limits, mandatory packaging requirements, and taxes.

What about California? Seventeen years after deciding that marijuana should be at least as permissible as Vicodin, California still has no statewide regulations governing the production and distribution of medical marijuana. Since the U.S. Department of Justice has suggested it will not meddle with pot legalization in states with "strong and effective regulatory and enforcement systems," California is increasingly characterized as a dysfunctional laggard.

The onetime medical marijuana trailblazer, concluded a September article in the SF Weekly, is "being left behind ... stalled out while other states innovate and attract entrepreneurship." In The Huffington Post that same month, Diane Goldstein, a spokesperson for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, voiced similar concerns: "In California, it's been the wild, wild west. The laws have been too vague, and when the laws are too vague, it allows people to undermine the law--both the bad apples in the industry and law enforcement."

But how accurately does a phrase like "the wild, wild west" describe what has taken place in California? A previously forbidden sector of commerce has evolved into an increasingly professionalized multibillion-dollar industry, complete with a robust retail infrastructure, a lucrative trade in equipment and supplies, trade shows, media outlets, educational institutions, and a surprisingly vast supply of entrepreneurial Stoners who seem to get at least as buzzed by marketing, product innovation, and event management as they do by a few puffs of Platinum Skywalker. All without any regulatory hand holding from Sacramento.

Recently I visited CW Analytical, a commercial laboratory located in an industrial part of Oakland, across the street from a Mother's Cookies factory. Inside the lab, a technician in a white lab coat hovered intently over a table adorned with an array of small plastic vials...