[Please read this together with the previous post.]

(In the previous post I discussed specific statements of Mark Kleiman's.  In this one I want to try and deal with the expressed fears behind Mark's refusal to back legalization.)

 Rather than address Mark's last two points directly, since they spring from his misunderstanding of the stimulus idea, I'd like to dig deeper into Mark's seemingly Quixotic fight against legalization - a fight he may be backing away from --and the assumption that he has said fuels his fears.

           Mark fears a 'marijuana industry' which he sees as an equivalent of the alcohol industry, spurring people on to consume their products by advertising, branding, etc.  (It is irrelevant to this discussion, but I think Mark overstates the effects he sees, even for alcohol.  Even there, I could make a case that most advertising is for market share, not market-building, but even if Mark is closer to right than I am, it doesn't affect my rebuttal.)

          Mark's picture of the 'drug business' seems to be a unified, vertically integrated business, controlled from the top, an equivalent of the old 'trusts' except that no one group has unified control of the industry.  And this business model seems to fit the cocaine industry, and maybe the heroin industry - which I know almost nothing about.

          It does not fit cannabis, it has never - in the forty years I have been smoking, buying marijuana, talking with people on various levels of the business, observing and reading about the topic - fit cannabis.  And there is a very strong reason why it is never likely to be true about cannabis.

          Marijuana has never been an integrated industry anywhere along the line.  (Even the smuggler interviewed on Marijuana, Inc. demonstrated this.  He was bringing in a huge amount of marijuana, yet he was just an importer, with no control over his product after he off-loaded it.)

          In fact, while "Marijuana, Inc." was a great name for a tv show, in reality 'there ain't no sech animal.' The business model for marijuana is a very familiar one.  A large number of independent buyers, a large number of independent sellers, low capital to get into the business. (I twice was a low level 'street' dealer - in fact a dealer to my co-residents at two large--cheap - hotels.  In both cases I got into business with less than $100 in my pocket - or bank account, in both cases I was moderately successful for a time, enough to cover my own supplies and a little extra.)  Buyers choosing sellers on grounds of price, quality, reliability, or convenience.  (I could probably double the length of this with anecdotes - the family, father and three sons, all dealers who lived and dealt from the same place, but the father and the older son had one 'wholesaler,' the younger sons had another - and better - one.  Or the dealer who worked out of the same hallway, every day from 10A.M. to 2 P.M., rain or shine, except for a yearly month-long vacation in Puerto Rico, for at least fifteen years that I know of.  Price high, quality uneven, but exceptional reliability.)

          I am not denying that there may be small 'local monopolies' but even there a buyer only needs to take a subway or bus a couple of stops, or drive to the next town, or talk to a friend at work, if he doesn't want to do business with them.

          Beginning to sound familiar?  Marijuana is one of the few businesses that operates under the classic pre-corporate economics that people like Smith and Marx wrote about.

          And there is a reason for this, a reason why there will never be the sort of 'corporate takeover' that Mark envisions, or the sort of advertising and market manipulation he is afraid of.  Let me ask you a question.  What brand of carrots do you buy, or regularly see advertised?  Or lettuce?  Cucumbers?  How about fresh tomatoes?  Beef?

          None of you probably can answer these questions.  Okay, some of you might get Foxy Lettuce, but carrots, you buy them loose, or don't notice the name on the bags, or get them from a local farmer or grow your own.  The same, only more so for tomatoes.  (I grew up in Jersey, and one block I grew up on produced enough tomatoes each year that everybody was looking for someone to give them to.)  And does anyone buy prepackaged cucumbers.  (Those carrots and cucumbers and tomatoes you buy loose DO have brands, but you'd never know it if you didn't see them being uncrated.)

          But unprocessed agricultural products - and marijuana is an unprocessed agricultural product -- don't lend themselves to the kind of corporate exploitation that Mark fears.  The exceptions, Dole pineapples, Chiquita bananas and various teas and spices, all share common traits.  They are imported products grown in a relatively small area, and the market dominance of certain companies was established during the time of an economic imperialism not likely to be repeated.

          There is simply not going to be an Anheuser-Busch of marijuana.   Not just because the product doesn't lend itself to this sort of corporatism, but because if there was 'big corporate money' to be made in marijuana, it would be legal by now, or, at the very least, marijuana reform organizations would be much better funded, and there would be politicians fighting for its legalization - not the Ron Paul or Dennis Kuchinich types, but veteran and respected Congressmen.

          Think a minute.  In the forty years I've been smoking, there have been several periods where the 'magic words' on Wall Street were 'diversification' and 'acquisition.'  People have been expecting legalization for years.  How many feasibility studies must have been done on the potential profits to be made from it?

          But if any of these had shown the profit was 'worth the gamble' - at a time when Wall Street loved gambling and gamblers, wouldn't a corporation have done its best to secure these profits?  And how better to secure the profits than to influence the time of legalization, so the day the bill is signed, the company is ready to go into production on its corporate marijuana?

          Any mega-company even considering getting into the business would have started by running publicity campaigns, by backing existing reform organizations or, more likely, starting one of its own.  And - certainly in the Eighties, it was *ahem* not unknown for companies to suggest courses of action to friendly Congressmen that would benefit the companies.

          There has been none of this, not in the 80s, not in the 90s, not now.  No corporate funded research on marijuana that emphasized its relative harmlessness.  Not sudden influx of corporate money into existing organizations, no new, highly funded pro-legalization organization.  No publicity campaigns moving the country towards accepting legalization.  No corporate-connected Congressmen making impassioned speeches on the floor suggesting they have reconsidered.

          There could have been.  The arguments for legalization have always been out there.  Even Conservatives had the 'cover' of Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater.  The silence demonstrates clearly that none of these feasibility studies showed enough profit to interest even some of the wilder risk-takers in Corporate America.

          And if they didn't try to be the first into the pool, they aren't going to want to enter a business where they are competing with any farmer with a few spare plots of land, with small sellers who keep selling once its legal, with cooperatives. 

There will not be the sort of ads Mark worries about.  The most that can be expected are low-key spots from regional 'grower's associations' fighting for a share of the market for their region, the way California and Florida fight over the orange market.  ("Don't say marijuana, say California marijuana"  "Remember what real Hawaiian was like.  Refresh your memory with the greenest of the green."  "Kansas, marijuana with heart from the heart of the country."  "Try New York Diesel and say 'fugheddaboudit' to all the rest.")

          There will be corporate money made in the marijuana trade, but not by selling the product itself, which will always be limited primarily to small growers and trade associations.  But there will be several attempts to start Starbuck's-like chains of marijuana cafes, at least one of which will be successful.  The import-export business will be big, but the company that stresses export is the company to back.  Burpee Seeds or their competitors will probably establish a major hold on the seed sales.  And if anybody tries to get you to invest in a chain of nurseries selling half-grown or full-grown plants - and they check out when you investigate them - do so.

          So, Mark, relax, chase the chimeras away, take a moment to think about how marijuana prosecution interferes with other drug-control methods, how condemnation of marijuana hurts the credibility of any other anti-drug campaign.  Maybe you'll find yourself more comfortable over on this side - and you'd certainly be an asset.