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Mark Kleiman's website is: http://www.samefacts.com
A REPORTER AT LARGE
BUZZKILL
Washington State discovers that it’s not so easy to create a legal marijuana economy.
BY PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE
NOVEMBER 18, 2013
Washington’s law gave state officials only a year to answer difficult questions: Who could grow legal pot? Who could sell it? How much would an ounce of the drug cost?
One morning in August, Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at U.C.L.A., addressed the Seattle city council on the subject of marijuana. Kleiman is one of the country’s most prominent and outspoken analysts of drug policy, and for three decades he has argued that America’s cannabis laws must be liberalized. Kleiman’s campaign used to seem quixotic, but in November, 2012, voters in Washington and Colorado passed initiatives legalizing the use and commercial sale of marijuana. Immediately afterward, the State of Washington decided that it needed help setting up a pot economy. State bureaucrats don’t generally sit around pondering the improbable, so they had made no contingency plans. A call for proposals was issued. Kleiman assembled a team that beat out more than a hundred other contenders for the job. He calls himself a “policy entrepreneur,” and offers advice through a consultancy that he runs, botec Analysis Corp. In a nod to the ambiguity inherent in studying illicit economies, botec stands for Back of the Envelope Calculation.
Washington and Colorado have launched a singular experiment. The Netherlands tolerates personal use of marijuana, but growing or selling the drug is still illegal. Portugal has eliminated criminal sanctions on all forms of drug use, but selling narcotics remains a crime. Washington and Colorado are not merely decriminalizing adult possession and use of cannabis; they are creating a legal market for the drug that will be overseen by the state. In a further complication, the marijuana that is legal in these states will remain illegal in the eyes of the federal government, because the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 forbids the growing and selling of cannabis. “What the state is doing, in actuality, is issuing licenses to commit a felony,” Kleiman says. In late August, after months of silence, the Department of Justice announced that it will not intervene to halt the initiatives in Washington and Colorado. Instead, it will adopt a “trust but verify” approach, permitting the states to police the new market for the drug. Many other states appear poised to introduce legalization measures, and the Obama Administration’s apparent acquiescence surely will hasten this development.
Washington’s initiative, called I-502, received fifty-six per cent of the vote, with especially strong support in western Washington, around Seattle. Voters saw a lot to like: the end of prohibition of a drug that many people enjoy and consider harmless; a fresh source of tax revenue; an end to the punitive, and racially discriminatory, enforcement of marijuana laws. Each year, U.S. authorities make more than three-quarters of a million arrests for marijuana offenses. Blacks are more than three times as likely to be arrested for such offenses as whites are, though they are no more likely to use the drug. Pete Holmes, the city attorney of Seattle, told me that state prosecutors had stopped indicting people for marijuana possession, because local jurors found the prohibition so objectionable that they tended to acquit on principle. A few years ago, Holmes stopped prosecuting misdemeanor marijuana-possession cases. He then publicly endorsed I-502.
The law, which was sixty-four pages long and contained hundreds of specific provisions, assigned the liquor-control board the role of regulating the pot market. Yet many difficult questions remained: Who would be allowed to grow legal marijuana? Who would be allowed to sell it? How much would an ounce of legal pot cost? The legislation gave Washington officials only a year to come up with answers. Randy Simmons, the state’s project manager for I-502, says, “From the week after the initiative passed, it’s been about a hundred and fifty miles an hour.”
The liquor-control board instructed Kleiman and his associates at botec to submit research papers outlining the advantages and disadvantages of rival approaches to legalization. They were to be paid two hundred and ninety-two dollars an hour. In the spring and summer, Kleiman’s team engaged in the often surreal enterprise of conducting market research on a black market: producing reports on the number of active marijuana users in each county; estimating how many retail cannabis outlets would be needed to serve that population; assessing how various tax schemes might affect the price of the drug. They also investigated protocols for “product quality standards and testing.” Kleiman’s mandate was to offer officials options, rather than prescriptions. But he has a lot of opinions, and does not excel at hiding them.
If Seattle has welcomed the legalization of marijuana with utopian optimism—a conviction that Washington’s experiment will eventually sweep the nation—then Kleiman can seem like a total downer. Allergic to cant, he speaks with the bracing candor of a scientist in a disaster movie, and appears to derive grim pleasure from informing politicians that they have underestimated the complexity of a problem.
The council meeting took place at City Hall, a glass-and-steel building overlooking Puget Sound. Council members sat around a long table, looking scrubbed and upbeat, as Kleiman—a large man of sixty-two, with a lumbering gait and an unruly gray beard—took a seat before a microphone. “One of the ideas that has actuated the cannabis-legalization movement is that law enforcement really has bigger fish to fry,” he said. “We’d rather have cops chasing burglars than pot sellers. And that’s a reasonable viewpoint.” He paused. “But the implication of . . . a legal commercial market is not that you need less enforcement.” The city councillors looked anxious. “That’ll be true in the long run,” Kleiman allowed. “In the long run, there shouldn’t be much of an illegal business. . . . In the short run, though, the answer is just the opposite.”
When legal marijuana goes on sale, sometime next spring, the black market will not simply vanish; over-the-counter pot will have to compete with illicit pot. To support the legal market, Kleiman argued, the state must intensify law-enforcement pressure on people who refuse to play by the new rules. A street dealer will have to be arrested in the hope that “you will migrate that dealer’s customers into the taxed-and-regulated market.”
Officials in Washington had been expecting a peace dividend, yet Kleiman was calling for a crackdown. It was the kind of logical argument that nobody wants to hear. Not even law enforcement: to a narcotics detective, pot legalization can feel like an existential affront. As if to deepen the insult, tax revenue from the sale of legal cannabis will be devoted to substance-abuse prevention and research—not to police or prosecutors. Who, then, was going to pay for such a crackdown? Although Kleiman urged state officials to set aside funds for increased law enforcement, he can get impatient with such complaints. He likes to say, “You don’t get any of the revenue for arresting robbers, either.”
He left the city councillors with a warning: without intensified law enforcement, pot legalization might not succeed. “The illicit market is a paper tiger,” he concluded. “But a paper tiger doesn’t fall over until you push it.”
As an undergraduate at Haverford, Kleiman was a triple major in political science, economics, and philosophy, and he readily concedes that he analyzes things to death. His friend Phil Heymann, a professor at Harvard Law School, recalls having lunch with Kleiman at a university cafeteria. Kleiman launched into an impromptu analysis of the arrangement of the buffet tables and the traffic patterns of his fellow-diners, riffing on the optimal layout for the efficient allocation and consumption of lunch. “There’s a puzzle-solving quality to Mark,” Heymann says. “He loves to think through the decision theory of everything.”
Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, worked with Kleiman in Washington. In drug-policy circles, he says, Kleiman is known as a prodigious generator of unorthodox solutions: “Not all of these ideas turn out to work in practice, but a lot of what happens in the whole field is Mark throws out an idea and then we all investigate it, check it, respond to it.” Kleiman has never been married and has no children, which allows him to crisscross the country, bestowing policy advice, most often on matters of criminal justice. This year, he is on track to hit a hundred thousand miles.
Kleiman prides himself on being unconstrained by fixed ideas, and tends to discuss policy as if it were an engineering problem—a dispassionate tabulation of costs and benefits. He has been fiercely critical of the excesses of drug enforcement, but he also distrusts the unfettered libertarianism of those who would like to see all narcotics legalized. Harold Pollack, the co-director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, says, “Mark has a kind of iconoclastic credibility that comes from the fact that he doesn’t fit neatly into the usual ideological camps you find in criminal-justice policy.”
Ethan Nadelmann, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a national group that advocates the decriminalization of all drugs, is more skeptical. “Mark has always caricatured the drug debate as the hawks on one side and the doves on the other, and he’s the wise owl sitting in the middle,” he says.
Although Kleiman has consistently pushed for a relaxation of cannabis laws, on the ground that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol and that the war on drugs has not worked, he has expressed wariness about full legalization, which he once described as “a heavy wager on a coin flip.” As recently as 2010, he condemned a ballot measure to legalize the commercial sale of marijuana in his home state of California. In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, he observed, “The only way to sell a lot of pot is to create a lot of potheads—not casual, moderate recreational users but chronic, multiple-joints-per-day zonkers.” The initiative was voted down.
But as the costs of prohibition accumulated—and legalization began to seem not just possible but inevitable—Kleiman began to reconsider his views. “We’re now in 1928,” he told me, likening this moment to the final days of alcohol prohibition. “It’s about to collapse under its own weight.” He was uniquely positioned to offer guidance. “Mark has the advantage that he’s been thinking about these questions for decades,” Thomas Schelling, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told me. “He is the best there is on drugs.” Last March, when Washington’s liquor-control board announced the appointment of the botec team, Kleiman wrote in a blog post, “All the claims we’ve made over the years about knowing how to make smart drug policy are about to be put to the test.”
Cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug on the planet. For millennia, it has been cultivated for both its medicinal and its psychoactive properties. Ancient Chinese texts recommend the plant as a surgical anesthetic. Herodotus describes the Scythians inhaling cannabis fumes, then shouting in ecstasy. In America, cannabis became illegal only in 1937, and the ban has never been especially effective. According to a Pew poll, more than thirty million Americans have used pot in the past year.
Before Kleiman entered academia, he worked in the government. In 1979, he joined the Department of Justice, where he wrote a series of memos arguing that aggressive enforcement of marijuana laws would be counterproductive. At the time, most pot in America was a low-potency product from Mexico; when U.S. authorities tried to impede smugglers, they succeeded mainly in driving up the price, which enriched the smugglers without significantly dissuading users. Moreover, by squeezing the supply from Mexico, U.S. authorities inadvertently encouraged domestic cultivators, who produced more intense strains of the drug.
In 1980, ten per cent of high-school seniors reported daily use of marijuana, and Ronald Reagan denounced it as “probably the most dangerous drug in America.” As President, he quadrupled federal spending on drug enforcement. Kleiman continued writing memos, but nobody was paying attention. In 1983, he left government for the Kennedy School, at Harvard, turning his memos into a Ph.D. thesis and then his first book, “Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control.” Kleiman argued that, although legalization represented “a radical, near-complete solution to the problem of the illicit marijuana market,” it also risked “a potentially huge increase in the social costs of consumption.” A better solution, therefore, was not the lifting of prohibition but “a severe enforcement cutback.”
In 1996, California passed an initiative to legalize medical marijuana. Studies suggest that cannabis can help relieve the debilitating pain caused by chronic ailments and the nausea associated with chemotherapy. It was a decisive moment for the public image of the drug. “The only thing more potent than drugs as a negative symbol is cancer,” a medical-marijuana advocate told Kleiman at the time. “We’re going to make people choose between drugs and cancer. And they’re going to vote for drugs.”
Since then, nineteen other states and Washington, D.C., have passed similar measures. A 1991 survey found that only seventeen per cent of Americans supported fully legalizing marijuana. A Pew poll in 2010 showed that the number had jumped to forty-one per cent. By now, a majority of respondents favor the change. Young voters are twice as likely as the elderly to embrace legalization. Shifts in attitude are discernible even in conservative constituencies. The evangelist Pat Robertson recently told the Times, “We should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol.”
Alison Holcomb, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U. in Seattle, wrote the ballot initiative that became known as I-502. She told me that her public-outreach efforts had targeted moderate voters who were not necessarily cannabis consumers themselves. “The majority of people don’t like marijuana, but they also don’t like our laws,” she said. “So the message pivot is that you can support reform while not liking marijuana.” Holcomb highlighted the role of Mexican drug cartels, which have made billions of dollars by supplying the American black market, and have been responsible for more than sixty thousand deaths in Mexico in the past seven years. Murderous cartels may be an even more potent negative symbol than cancer.
In her campaign, Holcomb emphasized that Washington had successfully legalized medical marijuana, in 1998. Crime did not go up. The streets were not overrun with dazed potheads. Instead, the black market gave way to a quasi-respectable, if mostly unregulated, scene.
One afternoon, in the comfortable Seattle neighborhood of Capitol Hill, I visited Muraco Kyashna-Tocha, who runs Green Buddha, one of the oldest medical-marijuana dispensaries in town. A woman in her fifties with short gray hair, she answered the door in yoga wear, a giant white cockatoo balanced on her shoulder. “Come on upstairs,” she said. “I’ll show you my grow.”
Kyashna-Tocha has been cultivating marijuana for more than half her life. For many years, she did it illegally, until she was ratted out by a landlord, and busted, in 1997. Although the charges were dropped, the experience traumatized her, and when Washington legalized the medical use of marijuana she went into the dispensary business. She sells high-end sinsemilla—unpollinated female cannabis flowers—to medical-marijuana patients. Kyashna-Tocha is a patient herself: she told me that she has a seizure disorder, degenerative disks, and lingering pain from old operations.
Upstairs, we entered a humid, windowless room. Thirty cannabis plants stood beneath a canopy of fans and lights. “I can pull twelve pounds a year out of this room,” Kyashna-Tocha said. She pointed at the bristly plants: “That’s an Alaskan Thunderfuck. That’s Lemon Haze. Feels like espresso. Really big buzz.” Talking to boutique cannabis growers can resemble an encounter with an earnest sommelier. There are two subspecies of cannabis, she explained: indica, which mellows you out, and sativa, which boosts your energy and gives you a buzz. She added, “I used a little sativa before you arrived.”
In Washington, operating a dispensary is a legally ambiguous enterprise. Patients who obtain a “green card” from a sanctioned medical provider can grow up to fifteen cannabis plants. These users can pool their plants and form a collective, in which the growers are “reimbursed” for their costs. Kyashna-Tocha stressed that Green Buddha is nonprofit, adding that it generates only a modest income for her. But many medical outlets in Washington openly pursue profits. In a 2007 raid, Seattle police recovered fifteen hundred plants from the home of one dispensary owner. (The owner, who maintained that he represented twelve hundred patients, was not prosecuted.) Moreover, many “patients” are recreational users who have obtained a green card from a lax or unscrupulous medical provider. In 2010, Kyashna-Tocha told me, the state began allowing naturopaths to authorize cannabis patients, and “the whole scene completely blew out—you went from five dispensaries to sixty-five in, like, three months.” Some dispensaries stopped growing their own pot, because it was cheaper (if illegal) to import large quantities from California.
Kleiman considers the dispensary business to be farcically unregulated. “Anybody can make you a ‘patient,’ including a nurse practitioner,” he says. “I don’t think they’ve gotten to plumbers and veterinarians yet, but they’re getting there.” It’s not clear how dispensaries will fare once legal pot stores open. The framers of I-502, not wanting to alienate enthusiasts for medical cannabis, pointedly sidestepped the fate of the dispensaries and scarcely mentioned medical marijuana. Kleiman, however, was adamant from the start: he argued that the new regulated market was more likely to succeed if the state supplanted dispensaries with I-502 stores. Medical marijuana is not taxed, so it may remain cheaper than legal cannabis; Kleiman maintained that the solution was to make sure that only genuinely sick people could receive medical cards, and then set up the I-502 stores so that such patients could purchase pot tax-free.
One advantage of the I-502 stores is that their marijuana will be tested for mold, fungus, pesticides, and other impurities. The state’s dispensaries are not required to subject their product to such evaluations. Several years ago, Kyashna-Tocha established the Evergreen State Cannabis Trade Alliance, which encouraged dispensary owners to submit marijuana for testing, and issued a label for “patient-ready” weed. But her effort stalled: few dispensary owners were willing to incur the additional expense, and their customers were apparently untroubled by the possibility of impurities.
When Alison Holcomb started promoting the legalization initiative, the strongest opposition came not from law enforcement but from dispensary owners. “It was a horrible split that went right down the middle of this community,” Kyashna-Tocha said. She supported the measure, and wept with joy on election night. She hopes that the state can keep the new pot industry small. “Think microbrew,” she likes to say. At her house, she spoke excitedly about the possibilities of pot tourism: “I completely see bed-and-breakfast tours! You go to where the grow facilities are in the day, and then, toward dinnertime, you land in a couple of the stores and make your selection.”
Even so, Kyashna-Tocha conceded that many consumers are not attuned to horticultural subtleties. “Budweiser is what sells,” she said. The sativa seemed to be wearing off. She hoped to keep her dispensary alive by catering to connoisseurs, she told me, but legalization might well render her obsolete. “I may need to find a job about a year from now,” she said.
Relying primarily on survey data, Kleiman and his colleagues determined that Washingtonians consume a hundred and sixty-five metric tons of pot a year. The botec team concluded that Washington could accommodate this demand with approximately three hundred I-502 stores, most of them distributed along the Pacific Coast, where use is highest.
Kleiman’s team next addressed the vexing issue of price. Economic theory would suggest that prices in the black market—and even in the quasi-legal medical market—are artificially high, because there is a “prohibition premium” associated with products that are less than completely legal. You’re not just paying for the commodity; you’re compensating everyone who undertook risk in getting it to you. In Washington, legal cannabis should be cheap to produce. Growing costs are minimal, and curing marijuana is less costly than curing tobacco.
If you make cannabis too cheap, however, you run the risk of “diversion,” in which pot that is legal in Washington feeds the black markets in surrounding states. In a recent letter to the Department of Justice, a coalition of former drug-control officials warned that “diversion of the drug will explode” once marijuana becomes fully legal in Washington and Colorado. Alison Holcomb, the I-502 author, is untroubled by this possibility. She asked me, “If people in New York are smoking Washington marijuana, isn’t that better than smoking Mexican marijuana?” Diversion is another reason for Kleiman’s call for a law-enforcement crackdown: if the Feds determine that cheap weed is flowing out of Washington, they might shut the experiment down.
One way to raise the price of legal marijuana is through taxes. Under I-502, the state will take an excise tax of twenty-five per cent when the producer sells to the processor (unless the producer does the processing himself). Another twenty-five-per-cent tax will be imposed when the processor sells to the retailer. Finally, consumers will pay an additional thirty-five per cent or so in taxes at I-502 stores. Washington’s liquor-control board estimates that the state will receive up to two billion dollars in marijuana taxes over the next five years.
Kleiman has wondered out loud, “What if we threw a legalization and nobody came?” During the initial months of his contract, the liquor-control board maintained that outdoor cultivation of marijuana would not be permitted. But cannabis, like any agricultural product, takes time to grow. Unless illegally cultivated plants were grandfathered into the new system, the I-502 stores might not have sufficient inventory when they opened. Kleiman and others pushed the board to allow outdoor plants, which have a higher yield, and to create a “path to citizenship” for cannabis plants that had been grown illegally. Troubled by the prospect of pot shortages, the board eventually relented on both points.
Early in the summer, Kleiman projected that legal cannabis in Washington will initially sell for at least forty-two dollars for an eighth of an ounce. Outdoor growing will lower that figure, but probably not enough to undercut street dealers. Ben Schroeter, who goes by Ben Jammin, has been selling pot in the Seattle area for forty years, and offers high-quality, locally grown product for twenty-eight dollars an eighth. He sells weed from California at twenty dollars an eighth. Some customers may be willing to pay a premium for the convenience, and the peace of mind, associated with buying legal pot that has been tested for impurities. But Ben Jammin says, “I assume that a lot of people are still going to come to me.”
At the city-council meeting in Seattle, Kleiman said that the tax scheme outlined in I-502 was rigid and shortsighted. Because of the state’s heavy surcharges, legal marijuana will likely be more expensive than the illicit equivalent; but, as production costs plunge, legal pot will become much cheaper. “We’re gonna have a tax that starts too high and winds up too low,” Kleiman said. He laid out a better approach: “The optimal tax system . . . if I were doing it on a blackboard, would have been somewhat homeostatic. You’re looking to maintain a price maybe a little bit below, or a little bit above, the current illicit price. And, therefore, you’d like to have the tax be low at the beginning . . . and rise as the cost in the industry falls.” The state didn’t reconsider its tax plan, however; the prospect of an immediate windfall was perhaps too tempting.
One group is definitely not coming to Washington’s legalization party: minors. Scientific evidence suggests that marijuana poses few long-term health risks to adults but can harm adolescents whose brains are still developing. The liquor-control board has made it a priority to keep people under the age of twenty-one out of I-502 stores. But, according to some studies, a quarter of marijuana consumers are underage. Kleiman told the city council that it would be better for children to get marijuana from parents or friends who buy it at I-502 stores than to obtain it through the black market, because of the testing and the quality control. Moreover, if kids keep resorting to the black market, they will sustain the criminal enterprises that I-502 was designed to eliminate. “Once you have a licensed-store system, you should expect—and in fact want—most of the pot that goes to kids to go through that system,” Kleiman said, adding, with a seditious grin, “You can’t say that out loud. But I can.” Young people who can obtain a green card already purchase pot from dispensaries. “Nineteen-year-old kids on skateboards with a medical-authorization card,” Ben Jammin told me. “That’s the cash cow now.”
The morning after Kleiman’s presentation at the city council, I drove to Tacoma to meet with Jay Berneburg, a lawyer who works exclusively on pot cases. Along the way, I heard a radio report on Kleiman’s presentation, which highlighted his call for a police crackdown.
In the reception area outside Berneburg’s office, I spotted a bowl of matchbooks. Each one was emblazoned with his phone number and the words “Drive Fast, Take Chances, Call Collect.” Berneburg is in his fifties, and has a ponytail and wire-framed glasses. His voice has an ebullient rasp, and he walks with a piratical swagger. “I have two hundred dispensary clients,” he told me, before catching himself. “Well, I represent collective gardens.” Many of Berneburg’s clients have worked in the marijuana industry for decades. When the liquor-control board starts issuing licenses, he told me, his clients will have to decide whether it’s worth it to “come in from the cold.”
He introduced me to a client—a longtime grower who asked that I not use his name. The man planned to apply for a license to grow pot, but complained that, because of all the taxes and restrictions, he’d have to “grow more to make less money.” Berneburg said that many of his clients are ambivalent. “I can get a bag of weed as easy as I can get a dozen eggs,” he said. “That’s the way it has been, and that’s the way it will be. The black market’s not going anywhere.”
Allen Ginsberg once suggested that the paranoia that sometimes results from smoking marijuana is an effect “not of the narcotic but of the law.” Berneburg and his clientele are dubious about the state’s intentions, and Kleiman’s presentation to Seattle’s city council did not help matters. “We’re going to have the toughest enforcement in the country to make our legalization plan work?” Berneburg sputtered. “That is ass backward!”
In his view, Kleiman’s proposal was driven not by high-minded policy considerations but by the logic of the street: “Look at what a thug will do for a thousand dollars. The state wants to make millions! I’m predicting a bloodbath, as the liquor-control board tries to capture market share. We’re going to see some weird shit go down.”
Berneburg began talking feverishly about jackboots and mass resistance, and I was reminded that part of the allure of cannabis is its historical connection to the counterculture. Berneburg recalled, “I was at a Grateful Dead concert once when I was a graduate student. I complained that there were cops there. And the guy I was with said, ‘It wouldn’t be any fun without the cops. If there wasn’t that risk and danger, who the fuck would care?’ ”
When Kleiman is not on the road, he lives in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, in a book-lined apartment overlooking a narrow courtyard. After I arrived there one morning, Kleiman prepared coffee, though he doesn’t drink it himself. In another departure from convention, he prefers hot chocolate, even in high summer. “I like chocolate, and it’s a stimulant,” he explained.
In 1995, after many years as a lecturer at Harvard, Kleiman moved to U.C.L.A. He enjoys the West Coast, but his pallor marks him as an outsider. He grew up in a Jewish enclave of Baltimore, where his father was a surgeon, and he misses the East Coast, where his ardor for policy is less exotic.
When I asked Kleiman about his experience with marijuana, he replied, “If you do drug policy and you’re asked whether you use drugs, you’ve got two choices. You can say, ‘Yes, I’m a lawbreaker. Please come arrest me and ignore everything I say, because I’m a bad person.’ Or, ‘No, actually, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.’ Since neither of those is an advantageous admission, I don’t answer the question.”
He was more forthcoming about psychedelics. He told me to look up a YouTube video that captures a raucous conference organized in 1990 by the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies. Kleiman, appearing alongside Timothy Leary and Ram Dass, wears a tie-dyed T-shirt and speaks about a future of “performance-enhancing” drugs. Kleiman told me, “I’ve never met anybody who used cocaine thirty years ago and says, ‘You know, I really learned a lot from my cocaine use.’ But you know the Steve Jobs quote about how Windows would be a better operating system if Bill Gates had dropped acid just once?” One of Kleiman’s books is called “Against Excess”—the title refers both to the war on drugs and to drug use. Leary, he told me, was undone by excess: “The tragedy of the sixties is that people managed to apply the drug-use practices of an Irish drunk to a very different chemical.”
In 1986, Kleiman and a collaborator, Peter Reuter, published a seminal paper, “Risks and Prices,” which argued that the drug trade should be analyzed not as a moral issue or a justice issue but as a market that is dynamic and adaptive. After the paper was published, Kleiman told Reuter, “We’re monopolists in selling drug-policy analysis. If only there were a demand for it, we’d be rich!”
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