Big Marijuana: How corporations and lobbies will shape the legalization landscape
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Big Marijuana: How corporations and lobbies will shape the legalization landscape
Big Marijuana: How corporations and lobbies will shape the legalization landscape
Bootleggers, Baptists, bureaucrats, and bongs: How interest-group politics will shape marijuana regulation
Worry about bad marijuana—not Big Marijuana
Four states and D.C. have legalized recreational marijuana, and more may do so this fall. But legalization is just the beginning of policy development. After legalization come commercialization and regulation—processes sure to be influenced by corporations and interest groups. How will lobbying and corporatization affect the structure and regulation of the licit marijuana market? And how should policymakers respond?
On June 16, the Center for Effective Public Management at Brookings released two papers examining these issues. Authors and Brookings Senior Fellows John Hudak, Jonathan Rauch, and Philip Wallach were joined by experts from government, private industry, the non-profit sector, and academia to assess the papers’ findings that state-level regulation can help rein in special interests and that big corporations can bring benefits as well as risks.
Read the papers:
- Worry about bad marijuana—not Big Marijuana
- Bootleggers, Baptists, bureaucrats, and bongs: How special interests will shape marijuana legalization
Join the conversation on Twitter at #BigMarijuana and @BrookingsGov
Agenda
Bootleggers, Baptists, bureaucrats, and bongs: How interest-group politics will shape marijuana regulation
Andrew Freedman
Director, Marijuana Coordination - Office of the Governor, State of Colorado
Kathleen Frydl
Author - "The Drug Wars in America, 1940-1973"
Alex Tabarrok
Director, Center for Study of Public Choice - Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics, The Mercatus Center George Mason University
Worry about bad marijuana—not Big Marijuana
Michael Correia
Director of Government Affairs - National Cannabis Industry Association
Andrew Freedman
Director, Marijuana Coordination - Office of the Governor, State of Colorado
John Hudak
Deputy Director - Center for Effective Public Management
Senior Fellow - Governance Studies
Jeff Zinsmeister
Executive Vice President and Director of Government Affairs - Smart Approaches to Marijuana
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The Duque government’s drug policy in Colombia is taking on a progressively ominous and counterproductive direction. It threatens to undermine the incomplete and struggling peace process, misdirect law enforcement resources, augment the alienation of coca farmers from the state and undermine human rights and drug users’ access to health services in Colombia. With their emphasis on criminalization of even drug possession for personal use and forced eradication, the announced policies clearly cater to the Trump administration’s doctrinaire and discredited drug policy preferences that harken back to the 1980s. But without sustainable livelihoods already in place, forced eradication will not sustainably reduce coca cultivation and cocaine production. The dominance of zero-coca thinking in Colombia whereby a community has to eradicate all coca first before it starts receiving even meager assistance from the state never produced positive results in Colombia.
