Column: Question 2 not all it’s cooked up to be

To legalize or not to legalize, that is the question we must answer on Nov. 8.

Or, is it?

I’ve taken my time this year to deliberate over the matter of recreational marijuana legalization — in spite of my general instinctive opposition to mind-altering substances — consulting with area experts on drugs and drug policy.

Following hours of interviews, reading and research, my conclusion is that there is something more sinister at stake here over Question 2 than simply the legalization of an illicit drug.

What we are being asked to vote on is whether or not to sanction and legitimize a cartel culture here in Nevada.

Doesn’t that just make your nose hairs curl? Well, it does mine anyway.

The very word “cartel” has a sort of bad karma to it that goes beyond the criminal underworld. It’s about a tiny little subculture of exclusion that holds vast amounts of power and influence.

Question 2 holds the keys to establishing a drug cartel right here in the Silver State, one that has been hidden by attractive packaging and tied together neatly by language that will make it all legal after Nov. 8.

My eyebrows were raised from a recent conversation I had with Hannah McDonald, Youth Program Coordinator for Partnership Carson City (PCC), a local non-profit agency that focuses on drug prevention through education.

What I expected to hear from her was that marijuana is bad, because it’s a mind-altering drug.

That’s what I think, after all.

But what I heard McDonald say made me reconsider my position on this ballot initiative.

“The issue isn’t so much whether you agree with recreational marijuana or not. This is just a bad, poorly written law,” she told me. “That’s why we are opposing it.”

Really? An established, well-respected community drug prevention program that’s opposing a drug legalization law because of the way it’s written?

I never would have expected that.

But it’s essentially the same answer I got from local law enforcement and legal experts, too.

Jim Hartman, a Minden-based attorney and public policy expert who is also president of the non-profit group, Nevadans for Responsible Drug Policy, spoke with me extensively on the subject of recreational marijuana laws and, in particular, Nevada’s Question 2 ballot initiative.

“I contend it is a special interest ‘business plan’ written exclusively for their own financial gain, not for the benefit of Nevadans, generally,” Hartman said. “Having the marijuana industry write the marijuana law in this state is no different than allowing Phillip Morris to write the smoking laws in Nevada or Anheuser-Busch write the liquor laws.”

Hartman has spent countless hours disseminating Question 2 and cross-referencing it with similar recreational marijuana laws passed in other states, including Massachusetts and Colorado.

He has been as meticulous in his studies about recreational marijuana law as he has been consistent in his opposition to Nevada’s Question 2, which Nevadans will ultimately answer on Nov. 8.

“The initiative never was subject to scrutiny and vetting,” Hartman said. “Instead it qualified for the ballot as a result of pot promoters paying $660,000 to mercenary signature gatherers. It could never have become law through the legislative process — whether Republicans or Democrats were in control.”

To add meat to his criticism, Hartman has pointed out specific language in the ballot initiative that could prove problematic — even detrimental — to Nevada and its infrastructure.

The first problem Hartman pointed out is that the ballot measure would require significant expansion of the powers and duties of the Nevada Department of Taxation (NDT), which would do much more than simply collect revenue from marijuana sales.

Under the initiative, Hartman said, the NDT would literally be overwhelmed with additional infrastructure needed to address its newly designated responsibilities, which include setting marijuana prices, regulating pot potency, certifying and licensing marijuana cultivation, manufacture, distribution, retail and testing.

“The tasks are so substantial that the initiative provides a one year period to ‘staff up’ for Nevada to begin running its marijuana business — without any revenues initially,” he said. “Colorado was required to hire 120 new employees in their Department of Revenue after legalization to run their marijuana program.”

Having been a state employee myself for a time, I can tell you that hiring isn’t done in a day or a week, much less a month. Very little is often completed in a year.

Imagine trying to add dozens of new employees — maybe a hundred or more — in a 12-month period of time. For a bureaucracy like the state, that’s a very brief window for so large a task. And it’s easier said than done.

In a nutshell, then, we are talking about the exponential growth of big government in order to satisfy the requirements of Question 2. This means more red tape, more laws, more confusion, more frustration, and a heck of a lot more money that will need to be spent to achieve the mandates of this potential new law.

“Voters need to realize that by voting ‘yes’ on Question 2, they will be adopting all provisions of a 13-page initiative written by large corporate marijuana interests,” Hartman said. “Nevadans need to know what it is not. This initiative isn’t a Nevada-based libertarian effort to ‘decriminalize’ or ‘legalize’ marijuana.”

The advertisements you see on Facebook and the internet, in the newspaper and on television supporting Question 2 grossly oversimplify the ballot initiative as some gallant effort to change our culture of crime and misuse by legalizing the illegal, by becoming permissive instead of restrictive with marijuana.

Either the backers of this initiative think Nevadans are simpletons who will buy their messages carte blanche, or they really believe the dope they are smoking.

But the evidence from Question 2 is not at all consistent with a utopian vision of libertarianism: limited government interference, fewer restrictive laws, more permissiveness, and a greater presence of the laissez-faire Invisible Hand of Adam Smith economics.

On the contrary, this measure would create a starkly visible fist that will be reaching into many more areas of our lives than simply our pockets.

A ballooned up state tax department with a broader reach is certainly not consistent with a traditionally libertarian desire to live and let live.

How much do you think it will cost the state of Nevada to start up and operate all-new divisions within a much larger NDT that will be burdened with a substantially more complex infrastructure and exponentially more people to pay?

Even a layman like me can forecast that the lion’s share of any revenue generated from marijuana sales in the first year — and likely even several years into the venture — may be going almost exclusively to fund the costs of running the new, but not necessarily improved NDT.

Hartman agreed with me.

He said Section 16 of the ballot initiative stipulates that marijuana tax revenues "first must be expended to pay the costs of the Department (of Taxation) and of each locality,” according to the language of the measure itself.

Only residual money gets deposited to the credit of the State School Distributive account, he said.

How much that residual money ends up being is really anybody’s guess at this point.

“Promoters of this initiative advertise that the marijuana tax money raised will go to education,” Hartman said. “The forecast in Nevada is that money raised for education would not even pay the construction cost of one middle school in Clark County.”

Hartman said even in Colorado, where Question 2 proponents tout the greatest success of recreational marijuana laws, the amount of money raised from marijuana sales toward education amount to only about one-half of one percent of the state’s general fund budget.

He said Colorado marijuana czar Andrew Freedman called his state’s weed law a “red herring,” observing that tax dollars collected from marijuana sales go mostly toward regulating the industry. That is, funding the agency responsible for carrying out the law.

Really no surprise to me. Whenever some new product is introduced on the market requiring public oversight, generally what happens is that the government ends up paying mostly to fund its regulatory activities.

In other words, the notion that selling a legalized drug will benefit schools, roads and other necessary infrastructure is likely to be a gross overestimation of what those services will actually receive.

I call that either wishful thinking on our part, or false advertising from the promoters.

Either way, Question 2 doesn’t sound like it will deliver as promised to schools.

Generally, Nevadans tend to flush politicians who don’t deliver. We ought to do the same with this initiative.

But before I close, I think a few of Hartman’s other points are worthy of mentioning here.

Nevadans pride themselves on their independence and a desire for more local control.

Well, Question 2 fails in both of these respects, too.

Hartman said the initiative’s language does not include the right found in Colorado’s Amendment 64 permitting a locality to prohibit cultivation facilities, product manufacture facilities, product testing facilities or retail marijuana stores.

That law also allows Colorado localities powers of licensure, affording them the privileges of local control over what they regulate, who gets licensed, and the revenues generated from that.

In the Centennial State, more than two-thirds of localities have exercised their right to opt out of the marijuana business.

But under Nevada’s Question 2, communities across the Silver State — in all 17 counties — would not have this liberty.

“The Nevada initiative gives the power of licensure exclusively to the state's Department of Taxation — no local control,” Hartman said. “All 17 Nevada counties should be prepared to be ‘force-fed’ retail marijuana stores in the numbers specified in the initiative.”

The loss of autonomy and the unprecedented growth of government aside, there is a darker, more sinister side to Question 2 that I feel needs to be brought to light.

Hartman’s research of the initiative determined it will essentially turn a statewide industry into a good-old boys club — a cartel — that discourages competition, limits membership, practices exclusion, and suppresses everyone else’s freedom to participate except their own.

According to the measure, Hartman said existing medical marijuana licensees in the state are granted grandfathering rights for up to 18 months to qualify for retail, manufacturing, and cultivation licenses ahead of everyone else.

This will give an exclusive group of retailers monopoly-like privileges to set prices on their products and make money off recreational marijuana sales that no one else will have to begin with.

The grandfathering rights will also be extended to liquor wholesalers who want to become marijuana distributors, Hartman said.

“More than a dozen existing medical marijuana dispensaries and five beer distributors have been identified as contributors to the ‘Yes on 2’ campaign,” Hartman said.

Good old boys, indeed.

Then there’s the language in the measure that aims to keep John and Jane Freemarket from participating in the process as a provider of marijuana products.

According to Hartman, fee schedules under the law would be steep, costing each applicant $5,000 for any one type of license. And the initial permit issued for a retail marijuana operation would cost around $20,000 per year.

“The high cost of licensing guarantees that only high wealth ‘pot-preneurs’ qualify for licenses,” he said. “The little guy is fenced out from making an application.”

This means Joe and Gina Everyman get the shaft again. Except to be able to buy, use and get high on the products that somebody else is making money off of.

Last, but certainly not least, among Hartman’s chief concerns with the initiative is the language contained in Section 14, restricting the right to cultivate marijuana.

Don’t be deceived by Section 6, Hartman warns, even though it permits those 21 and older to possess and use up to one ounce of marijuana, and to cultivate up to six plants for personal use.

There is a form of “bait and switch” going on, he said.

Under Section 14, Hartman said the right to cultivate is actually criminalized for those growing marijuana plants within a 25-mile radius of a retail marijuana store.

So, unless you live way out in the Nevada sticks, more than 25 miles away from a marijuana retailer — which, remember, could include the mile post liquor store — you won’t lawfully be able to grow your own marijuana plants.

Considering that Nevada’s population is located overwhelmingly in or around urban centers like the greater Las Vegas and Reno-Sparks metropolitan areas — and even Carson City — this pretty much rules out most of Nevada’s 2.8 million people.

The authors of Question 2 skillfully chose the 25-mile language, knowing full well that all but a small few Nevada communities will fall within that radius of at least one retailer.

Unless coyotes, jackrabbits or mysterious beings from Area 51 are used to run a growing operation somewhere in the Nevada outback around a place like Rachel, Nevadans by a wide margin won’t be. The human population here in the Silver State exists near enough to urban areas that a 25-mile radius pretty much rules the vast majority of us out.

“When the specified number of marijuana retail stores have their licenses issued, 95-98 percent of Nevadans will be barred from growing their own,” Hartman said. “This is phony legalization.”

Just how will that leave us where we aren’t already with marijuana as an illegal drug?

Without a doubt, people will attempt to circumvent the law and many will get caught, because marijuana isn’t one of those types of products that can be easily grown under the radar. Its pungency alone is distinct, unmistakeable and potent enough to carry a long way.

So, Question 2 potentially sets average well-meaning Nevadans up to be criminalized by the very law that deceptively is being billed as a legalization measure.

How will this be any different from the way things stand now? How many people could potentially be prosecuted for illegal possession, trafficking and distribution in Nevada if Question 2 passes compared with the number of people who are right now?

There’s an old saying that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Question 2 on the Nevada ballot appears too good to be true on the surface for ardent supporters of drug legalization.

But a closer look at the language of the initiative demonstrates weaknesses, even outright deceptions that could be exploited by any number of slick legal eagles — no offense, Jim — and end up costing the people of our state much more than we ever bargained for with this law.

I urge extreme caution toward Question 2. It looks more to me like a Trojan Horse, hidden with dangers, than some serendipitous effort to spread feel-good libertarianism.

Make sure, in your estimation, that it is everything you hope and want it to be. Because if it’s not, then a Trojan Horse it may well be.

Once passed, trying to reverse a law like this will prove to be even more costly and troublesome for us. Undoing what's been done is no easy task.

My dad used to tell me it’s a lot easier to start something than to stop it. Passing a law is much easier than stopping it once it has started.

Frankly, I don’t want to be back at this keyboard a year from now, writing an “I told you so” column. It will probably be just as much a waste of words then as it may be now to those who have already made up their minds to vote yes.

Nevada is on the verge of endorsing and sanctioning a drug cartel within its borders. The very language of this initiative makes it appear eerily similar to the dynamics of cartels that have existed for decades in some of the most notorious regions of the world.

Is that really the direction we want this to go? Think about it hard, and take care to vote with deliberate caution.

You’ve been warned Nevada, and be careful what you wish for.

You just might get it.