Co-Ops: The Next Step or Tipping Point?

Mark Kleinman has re-visited his stance on how to legalize marijuana without creating a marketing bonanza, and it’s interesting how his evolution in thought is being borne out by real-world events.  The question is, are things moving too fast for even his enlightened thinking?

In a previous post, tipped by Marks thought that pot should be legal to grow or “give away” but not to sell or advertize in the open market, I took a journey thought the current medical pot landscape  here in California.  I don’t know what state Kleinman lives in, but I think other states that are thinking about what to do about pot should really investigate everything that is going on here. Because every county here has been left to deal with the implementation of very vague medical laws, the resulting patchwork of good and bad ideas should be a learning lab for the rest of the country.

Interestingly, Marks compromise position of establishing non-profit co-ops which grow and sell pot for members has become the preferred method here in Los Angeles.  From 2003 to 2008 LA was the wild-west of weed, a period when hundreds of medical dispensaries exploded across the basin and valley.   Small incorporated cities were often able to keep out dispensaries with local zoning authority but in large swaths of unincorporated LA, where setting up a retail business is relatively easy, medical outlets bloomed like wildflowers.

Slowly, through a process of Federal and local busts and confiscations, some of the more brazen and shady organizations have been shut down, and a process of pressuring the remaining dispensaries to establish themselves as non-profit co-ops began in earnest.  The good dispensaries now offer a wide variety of organic marijuana in an astounding array of products – from the weed itself to candy – produced by reliable growers under co-operative arrangements, and they pay their taxes.  Exactly the scenario Mark envisions.

So what’s the problem with all this? Nothing, if you’re intention is to make marijuana as legal as possible without it actually being fully legal. In other words, it’s the wildly imperfect system that evolves under a regime where at any moment the Feds could come busting down your door.  It’s a compromise system that attempts to put a home grown co-op feel to not growing at home, but what happens when all this edifice goes away?  What if Democratic state assemblyman Tom Ammiano’s bill to legalize and tax marijuana were to become law, but as Mark suggests, this system of non-profit co-ops was made part of the deal, would it work?

My sense says no, as we’d end up with a situation like going to a bar in Utah, with membership cards and ridiculous barriers to entry.  It’s like this: currently going legal with a marijuana fix in LA is kind of a hassle.  You have to go see a doctor and pay him $200 to tell him about the pain in your lower back, and he writes a prescription which is good for a year.  Then you go to a medical dispensary, show them your prescription and drivers license – which they xerox and put in your file – and issue you a co-op membership card. Then, after consultation with a proprietor about which killer bud will cure your back pain, your sealed package emerges from a hidden room after payment and you leave. For patients with genuine need – those with sever pain or undergoing chemo – it’s a manageable system, but it’s also enough of a pain to keep out Joe citizen who just wants a joint once in awhile.

Admittedly this is much worse than getting a drink in Salt Lake City, but were pot to become legal for everybody under the condition that this co-op system remain, it would be almost exactly like getting a bourbon in SLC. Think about it. Free from the need for low profile, but given a preferable market position, these c0-ops will go from a dispensary model to a membership-club model.  Lounges will replace waiting rooms, pot smoke will fill the air, and going to a ‘club’ to hang out and smoke with friends will become as common as going to a bar on a Thursday night.  But there will still need for paperwork, for ‘membership’ and showing and ID and maitining a link between who grows how much for whom.

Utah, I hear, is doing away with some of the more ridiculas inpediments to getting a cocktail.  Once weed hits the free market, I think we’ll look back at the co-op era as just as quaint.