For years, supporters of legalizing marijuana for recreational use have been looking to 2016 as the year they would take their initiative to Arizona voters and win.
Now they are split in a way that endangers the prospects for legalization.
The division is pitting many of Arizona medical-marijuana dispensary owners against the Marijuana Policy Project, a national organization that is responsible for its industry’s existence, having drafted our state’s 2010 medical-marijuana law and funded the campaign.
Their conflict turned nasty after the splinter group, Arizonans for Responsible Legalization, formed on March 27.
On March 29, the national policy project’s executive director, Rob Kampia, threatened in an email to ruin the dispensary business of Phoenix-area physician Gina Berman, who is leading the breakaway group.
“If you file a competing initiative with the Secretary of State anyway, we will specifically launch a series of actions to harm your business, in the spirit of what social-justice movements do to boycott bad companies or bad business owners,” he wrote. “Everything we would do would be legal.”
“For example, I’m already budgeting $10,000 (as of Friday) to pay people for 1,000 hours of time to distribute literature outside of your front door, and the literature will not portray you in a kind way. We will not target any other dispensaries; we will only target you.”
Berman and other members of her group were working with the Marijuana Policy Project until last month.
“We had been working with these people for months, and had arrived at an agreement on a draft (legalization initiative) that worked for everyone and was what appeared to be the best way forward,” said Mason Tvert, spokesman for the policy project. “Then out of nowhere we learned that Gina had filed a committee and wanted to do something else. That was a total surprise.”
Berman and her group’s spokesman, Barrett Marson, say the Marijuana Policy Project was pursuing an initiative that was too broad to be readily approved by Arizona voters. They differed especially on two key points: How many new marijuana outlets would be allowed, and how much marijuana individuals would be allowed to grow.
In both cases, Arizonans for Responsible Legalization said the Marijuana Policy Project’s draft proposal would be too liberal. It does not strictly limit the number of new marijuana dispensaries, and it would allow six to 12 marijuana plants per household.
There are significant policy differences, but what underlies the concerns may not be policy as much as business interests.
In short, the splinter group would be protecting its own business interests by proposing an alternative legalization initiative that severely limits the number of new dispensaries and, likely, the amount that individuals could grow, while easing the path of existing medical-marijuana dispensaries to operate in the new system. In other words, they want to make sure any legalization initiative repays their investments and helps their returns without introducing too much competition.
Of course, they phrase their interests in the terms of political palatability.
“An incremental approach, that caps the number of dispensaries at or slightly above the current number of licensed dispensaries, is the only politically feasible approach,” Berman said in a written reply to Kampia.
Get that? Only the current medical-marijuana dispensaries plus a few more would be able to sell marijuana if legalized for recreational use.
As to growing your own marijuana, Berman wrote, “MPP has proposed a dramatic deregulation of homegrown marijuana. Arizona voters will not support this proposal.”
Maybe Berman has polling data I don’t know about, but it strikes me that one thing Arizonans would surely support is the idea of growing your own. That, it seems, is one of the good arguments for legalizing marijuana: If it’s possible to grow it in your background, the government ought not to be telling you you can’t do it.
But of course, homegrown pot introduces competition.
I asked Tucsonan Demitri Downing about the split, and he acknowledged that medical-marijuana dispensaries are seeing their interests impinged by the very group that, in a way, created them.
“The Marijuana Policy Project’s opinion of working with the industry is, ‘We’ll tell you what is good for you,’ ” said Downing, who has been a lobbyist for the dispensaries. “That’s not a partnership, that’s a dictatorship.”
“People risked their time, money and reputations to open their locations,” he went on. “Now you have the same national group who wants to come in and create an entire new regulatory structure and regulatory agency for an industry they just created.”
While the two pro-legalization factions bicker, and prepare their initiatives for circulation, an anti-legalization group has also formed. Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy argues that the negative health and social consequences of legalizing the use of another damaging substance far outweigh the benefits of legalization.
“Our hands are full in Arizona with legal substance abuse from products that are already available,” Seth Leibsohn, the chair of the group, told me.
I’ve long thought the opposite — that the benefits of marijuana legalization outweigh the costs. People often overlook the cost of policing marijuana as a black-market product and of the violence that results from the underworld trade, I’ve found.
But if we’re legalizing in a way that helps only those who already have a foot in the door, and not even allowing people the freedom to grow their own, that doesn’t seem like much of a benefit, either.
