It sounds like an idea a stoner might come up with.
It’s now legal in Washington to possess marijuana, to grow it, to smoke it and to give it away. But you’re not allowed to trade in it. You can give your neighbor up to an ounce, but if he gives you money or even bakes you a pie in exchange, that’s illegal.
The District of Columbia has legalized marijuana — but is trying not to create a market in marijuana. It’s aiming for a gift economy, not unlike what you might experience at Burning Man, but permanently.
Photo: Bloomberg/ Matthew Staver
‘GROW AND GIVE’
Other legalizing jurisdictions are taking a more traditional approach. Colorado and Washington state have both established regulated markets in marijuana that look a lot like those many states have to regulate and tax alcohol. District of Columbia council members were expected to do the same until Congress passed a law barring them from spending money to regulate marijuana. That left the city with noncommercial legalization as its only option after voters repealed the law prohibiting marijuana in the district in November.
The district’s lawmakers aren’t happy about the process, but maybe they should be pleased about the outcome. Mark Kleiman, a leading expert on drug policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been arguing for Washington’s “grow-and-give” approach for years. He is one of several researchers affiliated with the RAND Corp who have been urging states to look for intermediate options between prohibition and commercial legalization. They have urged states to consider approaches like nonprofit cooperatives, a government monopoly on marijuana production or a grow-your-own rule like the one Washington has ended up with, essentially by accident.
THE COSTS OF PROHIBITION
Drug prohibition imposes many costs. People go to jail for using and trading in drugs, causing major disruption to individuals’ lives and to communities. Illegal markets breed crime, including violent crime, because people in the drug business can’t use the courts to enforce contracts and settle disputes. And prohibition reduces access to a product that many people enjoy and use responsibly — although it’s not that hard to buy marijuana even where it’s illegal.
But Kleiman warns that full-scale commercial legalization comes with costs of its own. The main risk is that marijuana businesses will — as alcohol and tobacco companies did — successfully market their products to heavy users who would be better off using less, and that they will resist regulations that discourage problem use.
A recent RAND research brief says 80 percent of marijuana consumption is by daily and near-daily users. “So roughly 80 percent of marijuana companies’ profits would come from marketing to such heavy users, about half of whom currently meet clinical criteria for substance use disorders (either with marijuana itself or another substance, such as alcohol),” it concluded.
THE ‘WASHINGTON APPROACH’
Supporters of the Washington approach hope the city will enjoy the benefits of legalization without creating a well-organized commercial machine that encourages people to smoke marijuana.
“It’s very elegant, and it does have a lot of merit,” said David Frum, the conservative political commentator and an adviser to Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a group that opposes legalization but favors other drug law reforms. “It does seek to thread a path between the evils of having an industry that creates a lot of dependency and, on the other hand, having a lot of people in jail for issues that are fundamentally of dependency and not moral failing.”
While Frum objects to “grow-and-give” for opening a dangerous door, some libertarians object that it doesn’t go far enough. Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote in Reason that Washington would continue to have a black market in marijuana, as most people would continue to buy illegally because growing your own was inconvenient. She also notes consumers won’t get the quality control that comes with a legalized market.
Kleiman agrees with Mangu-Ward that Washington won’t have a true gift economy in marijuana. He expects small-scale illegal sales of the drug to continue, but he isn’t necessarily bothered by it.
“I kind of distinguish between flagrant and discreet drug dealing,” he says. “Discreet drug dealing happens in multipurpose locations indoors. Flagrant drug dealing occurs outdoors or in dedicated locations” — think street corners and crack houses. “Discreet drug dealing doesn’t attract much crime, while a flagrant dealer is a target.”
In other words, Washington’s reform isn’t about making the marijuana trade truly noncommercial. It’s about making the commercial aspects of the marijuana trade mostly harmless, occurring discreetly inside people’s homes, without attendant violence or mass marketing. He compares the issue to gambling — your home poker game might be illegal, but isn’t likely to cause violent crime or draw government attention in the way a full-scale gambling operation might.
That’s a theory — but it’s one we’ll get to test over the next few years. If Kleiman is right about noncommercial legalization, Washington should find success.
Warning: Marijuana consumption in Taiwan is illegal.
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS