9.4.9: Marijuana and Medical Marijuana

Marijuana

Perhaps the most widely broken law(s) in the United States over the last 40 years are those associated with the production and consumption of cannabis, better known as marijuana. Most people get away with breaking marijuana laws for sure, but according to the FBI, each year police arrested around 1.5 million people for various drug abuse violations. Marijuana- related offenses are easily the most numerous of those crimes, though arrests for the manufacture of marijuana has fallen as legalization and decriminalization progresses.

The prohibition against marijuana dates to the early 1900s, and it parallels in some ways the prohibition of alcohol. Americans disagree about the dangers and morality of using marijuana, and millions ignore marijuana laws. Law enforcement efforts vary wildly across the United States and have varied through time. Some US Presidents have pushed federal policy toward jailing all drug offenders; others are less enthusiastic about it. Several politically progressive states have sought to decriminalize or even make marijuana legal in recent years. Oregon and Colorado were the first to make recreational use legal.

Figure Woodland Hills, CA - The city of Los Angeles legalized medical marijuana and hundreds of dispensaries opened across the city in a matter of months. Many businesses used outlandish colors and languages to market their products

The production of marijuana is an important agricultural activity in many parts of the United States. Marijuana production hotspots have a lot in common with moonshining regions. Both tend to occur in isolated areas, especially in mountainous regions. Good soils and rainfall favor some locations more than others. In those locations, a lack of viable industrial or agricultural alternatives seems to be a key factor promoting marijuana production. Appalachian states are important suppliers of domestically grown pot in the U.S. Tennessee and Kentucky rank high for both the production of plants and the value per acre. Hawaii is also a major producer, partly because it has a great climate and superb soils, but also because it has little competition from outside. California, particularly the Emerald Triangle region in the northwestern corner of the state far out-produces the rest of the country. Like Appalachia, the remoteness of northwestern California makes it difficult for law enforcement to easily find illegal fields of cannabis. In locations where pot production is an important economic activity, law enforcement may have little incentive to aggressively police the activity, especially where law enforcement agencies' budgets are heavily reliant on taxes raised indirectly from the pot industry.

There is also a cultural-political variable driving California’s pot industry. Many of the people who established the pot industry in the Emerald Triangle were “hippies” who moved from the Bay Area in the 1970s. The “war on drugs” forced production into hidden locations. Over the years, the economy of northwestern California has become reliant on the marijuana crop. It is the leading industry there and the primary source of basic income for the region. The creeping legalization of marijuana production across the United States represents a significant threat to the economic lifeblood of the region. Not only would growers from other locations, who live closer to the major markets, be able to undercut growers in the Emerald Triangle via lower transportation costs, but more importantly the explosion of competitors (supply) would drastically lower demand and therefore lower the price of marijuana. Legal pot could be an economic disaster for the places that depend on bootlegging marijuana. Because the Emerald Triangle is essentially a monocropping agricultural zone, much like those places that rely solely on coffee or bananas, expanded competition can be ruinous (see Agriculture Chapter 3). If marijuana becomes completely legal in the US, growers in the Emerald Triangle may need to market their product differently. Marijuana producers in the Emerald Triangle may find themselves using the same marketing techniques used by vintners inn Napa Valley, touting the quality of the local soils, climate, and the skill of their master cultivators.

Figure Map States in New England and the west coast have moved to discriminate marijuana in recent years

Medical Marijuana

Perhaps no place in the country witnessed a more spectacular response to the legalization of marijuana than Los Angeles. When medical marijuana was legalized in 2004, hundreds of marijuana retailers, or dispensaries, opened within a few months. Some estimates put the number at around 600. Dispensaries outnumbered mainstream pharmacies by a wide margin. By mapping dispensaries, while using pharmacies as a control variable, several interesting questions could be answered about marijuana sales in LA. For example, what does the map of dispensaries tell us about who is using marijuana for medicinal purposes? For recreational purposes? One could assume that if marijuana was sold primarily for medicinal purposes, then the distribution of dispensaries should be very similar to the distribution of pharmacies. Instead, the map reveals dense clusters of dispensaries in specific neighborhoods (e.g., near college campuses) suggesting that marijuana is probably sold more for recreational purposes than for medical ones. California legalized recreational marijuana in 2016, once again changing the legal environment in which this industry operates, and those changes are bringing shifts in the landscapes of cannabis.

Figure Map - The eastern San Fernando Valley had an Unusual number of Maijuana dispensaries, especially compared to standard pharmacies. Discrepancies such as this suggest that recreational users fueled the expansion of the industry.