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November 14, 2010
California Election Aftermath
Supporters of California’s failed November 2nd initiative to legalize cannabis have three solid reasons to be confident that victory is probably no more than a few years off. All are essentially demographic: the first is that only 237 (3.81%) of the 6207 applicants I gathered data from were born before 1946; in other words, before the Baby Boom. The second is closely related: a majority of the relatively few pre-boomers were between 25 and 35 years of age before "initiating" marijuana (inhaling "reefer” for the first time) whereas their younger colleagues were overwhelmingly in their mid-teens at initiation. Finally: essentially everyone who applied for a “medical” designation was already a chronic user whatever their age; only a handful, five or so, were cannabis naive.Those rather straightforward findings provide both a solid time-line and firm starting point for evolution of the enormous criminal market for marijuana that exists today; it started growing only after the Baby Boom counterculture began coming of age in the mid-Sixties and quickly penetrated the nation's high schools, where trying marijuana has been a rite of passage comparable to trying alcohol and cigarettes, a pattern that's very unlikely to be changed by more drug war propaganda.
Collateral data supplied by applicants of all ages on their initiations and use of alcohol, cigarettes, and several illegal drugs support an entirely different hypothesis for the patterns of juvenile drug use than the speculations supported by supporters of drug prohibition, who are forced to rely on the less-than-complete Monitoring the Future studies that began(belatedly) in 1975 and thus also lack data from critical earlier years.
Beyond that, the older age at initiation of the pre-boomers in my study suggests that whatever market for “reefer” existed before the mid-Sixties must have been tiny and unsophisticated in comparison to the one that has developed since then. That's a finding that can easily be verified by obtaining year-of-birth data from older applicants already in possession of a physicians' recommendation.
Thus the discovery of “reefer” by Baby Boomers in the mid-Sixties was a signal event, a critical bit of history that has been assiduously ignored by both policy advocates and reformers, each for their own reasons. That reality that should become increasingly obvious as the first Boomers begin aging into Medicare on January 1, 2011.
On a more mundane note, perhaps the most immediately practical election result will be the identity of California's next Attorney General, a contest certain to be go down to the wire, perhaps beyond. If Cooley wins, I'll be surprised if he doesn't interpret a razor thin margin as a mandate for legal harassment and restriction of cannabis distribution outlets (dispensaries) to the extent possible.
One could hardly expect such a rabid Republican to do less.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at November 14, 2010 06:13 PM