A regulated market model

Over at Newsroom Pro ($), I make the case for basing legislation and regulation for cannabis markets on our existing rules for spirits.

The government has to have a referendum on cannabis by November 2020 and might want to have it earlier than that to not coincide with the general election. All the experts say that the referendum question should ask voters to endorse or reject a piece of developed legislation, with rejection meaning that the status quo stands. Writing legislation and regulation around some bespoke model for cannabis, to hit that deadline, would be a mess.

But it wouldn't be a mess if we had a good starting point. Existing rules around alcohol (spirits in particular - retail in specialist outlets rather than at the supermarket) handle a lot of problems that any regulatory framework for cannabis would have to solve too. How do you license retailers? How do you prevent minors from having access? How can we have both home production and commercial production? What should the rules be around advertising and marketing for commercial production? How much say should local councils have? How do consumers know what's in the product and what strength?

I'm not saying that the alcohol rules are perfect. But for any "But Whaddabout" question that comes up for cannabis, the starting point for an answer is looking at how we already deal with it for alcohol, see if the answer there for alcohol basically works for cannabis or whether it would need to be tweaked, then move on to the next one.

If we basically treated cannabis like spirits:

• People could grow at home for non-commercial use, sharing with friends; if they discovered that they had an excellent green thumb, they could set up a business and be subject to the rules for commercial supply, including excise. Remember how 42 Below got its start? A lot of folks in the cannabis community seem to think that allowing commercial growing and sale would kill the grassroots as big players would run everything, but just look at the thriving craft beer community and the developing craft distillation community. They all coexist along with lots of folks who brew and distil at home. 
• Products available for retail sale would have concentrations listed on the packaging. Alcohol has the strength and number of standard drinks. Excise would be based on product concentration.
• Councils could set Local Cannabis Policies that varied from the National Default Policy if they wanted, along with cannabis-ban areas where they might not want people smoking.
• Products couldn't look too attractive to kiddies - important for the edibles market. Same goes for advertising. There aren't really comparable alcohol edibles - there'd likely have to be additional packaging requirements to make it really clear that it's a cannabis-based product.
• On-licenses would have host responsibility requirements. Hopefully the SmokeFree Environments Act wouldn't kill on-licences or restrict on-licences to edibles - supervised consumption like this could be harm-reducing. 
• Retailers would be terrified of selling to kids because they'd face fines, licence suspensions, or complete loss of licence. 
• People involved in the sector would be declaring their earnings to IRD and paying tax on those earnings; companies in the sector would be paying company tax; purchased product would carry GST; producers would be able to claim back the GST on their inputs. 
• Cannabis-based products would be ineligible to be prizes in raffles. For some reason, alcohol is on the list of prohibited prizes. Cannabis would wind up there too if we just follow alcohol. Also, as aside, "vouchers or entitlements to commercial sexual services" are prohibited prizes under the same rules. Bans on alcohol as prizes for raffles at school fairs is a pain; I've not known the ban on raffling off brothel vouchers as being a binding constraint at school auctions. It would be rather fun to buy tickets for that raffle under other peoples' names though, just to make the prize drawing more fun. "Superintendent Chalmers wins the $500 voucher for Il Bordello!"

Update: worth checking out Russell Brown's summary of Friday's cannabis conference. I was there chatting with Labour's Greg O'Connor about his experiences in drug policing and his study tours to places that have steered away from prohibition. Here's Greg at a cannabis shop in Colorado.