I got a glimpse of the future during a recent visit to Seattle to hawk my new book. People were all in a tizzy there, because a majority of Washington state voters in November, as well as voting for Obama, had approved full legality for the wacky weed, marijuana. Now officials and politicians were figuring out what that meant. Mayor Mike McGinn was leading the way, welcoming the transition rather than seeking to stop it. He was meeting with pot growers, and putting together a to-do list. And to tell you the truth, McGinn, who arose out of the environmental and neighborhood activism side of things, and has a nice grin and a scruffy beard, looks like he just might have inhaled a few times himself over the years.
Good for him. But while I was reading news reports on all this in the Seattle Times, the now lone remaining daily newspaper, I suddenly got a picture of where the pot business might go, now that’s it’s legal. Right now, my impression is that pot as a market consisted of relatively small growers, doing their thing, and jockeying for customers in between avoiding pests, whether of bugs that ate their crops, agents from the feds, or gun-carrying competition.
But if pot was legal, then the question is, would the business of it inevitably begin to resemble most businesses, where the big eat the little, and the bigger eat the big, and the giant eat the bigger, until there are only one or handful of monopolies or semi-monopolies. This saddened me. Because one appeal of the current state of affairs in the marijuana business, from what I can tell, is its homegrown flavor, no joke intended. Perhaps in a decade or two hence we will look back on this as the golden age of pot. Or maybe, pot will find a way to stay local in flavor.
I can see two futures here, based on the business history of two other mind-altering drugs.
In and around 1900, American Tobacco had a lock on 90 percent of the tobacco sales in this country. It emerged from James B. Duke, the guy behind the university in Durham, NC, buying up competitors, and establishing a monopoly. After anti-trust action broke it up in 1911, parts of it would become RJR and other companies. While we no longer have American Tobacco, we do have a few giant companies that control most of tobacco products, not only in the United States but the world.
Now let’s look at wine. Despite its popularity, the market for wine is incredibly diverse, with thousands of producers and sellers, in France, Spain, Italy, the United States and others, each vying to grab a small niche. Sure there are a few big guys, like Yellow whatever from Australia, but there overall market share is still really small. Instead, small producers with a few acres of land in Napa, Long Island or Bordeaux or Rioja produce grapes, turn it into wine, and then bottle it themselves or have someone else do it. It’s a process not that dissimilar from pot (or tobacco).
One thing that keeps the wine world happily fragmented, (happily from my perspective of a wine lover), is the very medieval character of our alcohol laws. There’s a federal policy on alcohol (note the bureau of alcohol, guns and tobacco), and then each of the 50 states governs how its citizens can drink, buy, sell or import alcohol, including wine. While there is a lot of complaining about this, it also keeps wine little, a good thing. It’s very had for a national purveyor to master 50 regulatory regimes.
This may be fate of pot. Now the state of Washington legislature and the city of Seattle are crafting laws and regulations that say where marijuana can be sold, how it can be sold, to whom, and by whom. In these details, will be the future of the marijuana business, on the state level.
We may never have a common policy for it at the federal level that supersedes all those state laws now emerging. Which means pot may remain a business that is mostly state-by-state. This may keep it small, and staying small, in my book, is even better than staying high.