“Why are we so afraid of my opinion . . . ,” wonders Jeffrey Sweetin. “It took me 30 years to develop this opinion.”
It’s a fair point from the local chief of the Drug Enforcement Agency. We were seated in a Denver Post conference room with other writers and editors, and I’d implied that Sweetin, as a federal official, was out of line for injecting himself into Colorado debates about medical marijuana. But he lives here, after all, and knows a lot more than most of us about drugs and their origins and distribution.
If politicians, lawyers and journalists are free to dispense advice on the shape of medical marijuana rules, why shouldn’t a DEA agent?
Still, even the most experienced agent is hardly infallible on issues pertaining to drugs. Sweetin believes, for example, that if lawmakers sanction the existence of marijuana dispensaries, those outlets will “absolutely, positively” fuel the “black market I’ve worked my whole life against.” Yet why must that be so?
As I understood Sweetin’s explanation, “demand creates delivery,” so the thugs supplying the black market will gravitate — indeed have gravitated — toward the gray market of medical marijuana, too. And they will remain indispensable, apparently, because of their unmatched ability to supply the potent product sought by consumers. No doubt some dispensaries do conduct business with criminals. They’ll continue to do so, too, if lawmakers fail to craft an airtight regulatory model that shuts down fly-by-night outfits, requires meticulous documentation of all aspects of operation — from planting to harvest to sale — and authorizes a sufficient number of state inspectors to enforce the rules.
Nor is it clear why dispensaries and their satellite facilities won’t be able to grow whatever kind of marijuana that patients demand. I asked a Denver-area caregiver whose warehouse-style growing facility I visited early this year. “I grow the 20 best strains of marijuana I have found, to satisfy my patients desires,” he replied, “and I can grow any strain they may desire in the future.”
For that matter, isn’t it likely that properly regulated dispensaries will actually siphon away business from criminals to the extent that many patients once secured the drug from illegal sources?
“I go back to good old Adam Smith,” state Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver, told me. “You’ve got a demand curve and you’ve got a supply curve. I don’t think we’ve done anything to change the demand curve, but we’ve begun to change the supply curve.”
“Even if we’re changing the demand curve,” he added, “the dispensaries are the beneficiaries.”
Romer doesn’t deny that thousands of recreational pot users have managed to wangle their way onto the state medical marijuana rolls — and he’s sponsoring bills to curb this abuse. However, a year ago, he points out, these recreational users trafficked exclusively in the black market. If anything, he argues, dispensaries have already undercut the drug goons, rather than enriched them.
“Almost all of the marijuana consumed in the multibillion-dollar U.S. market once came from Mexico or Colombia,” The Washington Post reported last year. “Now as much as half is produced domestically, often by small-scale operators who painstakingly tend greenhouses and indoor gardens . . . .”
It’s a complex picture, with the cartels moving into big-time U.S. cultivation, too. Still, it strengthens the case for a vertically integrated, tightly regulated dispensary model — one whose product need not link its users to the bloody mayhem of the black market.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
