Weed the People author Bruce Barcott. Photo by John Keatley.
The latest book by Bruce Barcott delves into the earliest days of legal cannabis in Washington and Colorado, creating a unique, intimate storyline even for those who experienced the movement first-hand.
“Weed the People” follows the journey of not just the business people that brought recreational marijuana into the headlines of mainstream media, but also the author’s own journey from initially reluctant supporter of Washington’s Initiative 502 to becoming a medical marijuana patient himself and an advocate for legalization. He addresses both the hypocritical history of marijuana in the United States, as well as what the future holds.
Barcott, whose other books include “The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier” and “The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw,” recently spoke with Marijuana Venture about his effort to chronicle the cannabis industry.
Marijuana Venture: What were some of the things that struck you most as you were doing research for ‘Weed the People?’
Bruce Barcott: The most obvious thing to learn from Washington and Colorado comes under the heading of how states issue licenses to grow and to sell, but especially to sell.
Both Colorado and Washington, they have set up the regulatory scheme and they issued licenses. The growing end is not that difficult in terms of people applying for licenses. They have an idea of how to grow pot or at least some agricultural product.
The problem came in Washington with this idea that we should put everybody’s name in a hat and draw it in a lottery. Colorado had the advantage of already regulating its medical marijuana system, so that it had a framework already up and running, and it had experience with most of the players in the business and knew who the good actors were.
And so the first recreational sales licenses went to those people who were already up and running in the med system. And in Washington, we basically hadn’t regulated medical and we was asked everybody to put your name in and if you’re lucky, you’ll get drawn at random. That just hasn’t worked out well at all.
A little over a hundred retail shops have opened and more than 330 actual licenses or people who hold licenses, which is really a poor reflection of how the whole thing worked out. I call them ghost licenses. They’re floating out there, held by people with little to no retail experience or no chance of getting financing or no connection or experience in the cannabis world at all.
That’s the thing that has to be fine-tuned — it’s not just the fine-tuning, it’s the large tuning that I really try to emphasize, especially when I talk to people in Oregon and Alaska and Washington, D.C. and we’re all sort of expecting and hoping California will come on line at the end of 2016, so figure out how to issue these licenses whether it’s to people who are already in the business or there’s a judging system or scoring system where the state can look through these applications and give them a sharp eye and say “Look, these people have experience in business and a far better shot of actually realizing this enterprise.”
I think fairness overwhelmed us in this situation and I hope it doesn’t do that to other states.
MV: Most industries in the U.S. don’t allow vertical integration. The Washington system is slow and clunky, but we wonder if that might be better for the consumer down the road.
Barcott: I know one of the reasons Washington wanted to do that was that for the Liquor Control Board, that was where their experience lay. It was with separating producers from retailers. Colorado obviously started at the opposite end of the spectrum. I think you had to grow 70% of your own products to begin with in Colorado, but they’re opening that up now and I think you’ll see more and more natural specialization. People who love to grow and love to produce, that’s what they’re into. People who are great at retail, that’s what they’re into.
There are some folks that can pull off both, like with the guys at Medicine Man Denver, Pete and Andy Williams. That operation kind of works because Pete is all about the growing and Andy is all about the retail and he’s the face man. He’s the guy the public meets.
But it’s hard to find that in one person.
It will be interesting to see how that shakes out. I would put my money more on a natural separation between growers and retailers.
MV: Since ‘Weed the People’ was published, Gov. Jay Inslee signed into law a major overhaul of Washington’s medical marijuana system. How much have you paid attention to that and what are your thoughts about the new legislation?
Barcott: I was really glad to see the line-item vetoes he enacted prior to signing the bill. It’s an imperfect bill, but it had to happen. I really believe we had to bring these two systems together under one roof, under one regulatory scheme.
We’re getting the beta version of all these laws. We’re don’t get the 1.0 or 2.0, the smoothed-out version with no bugs. Our laws are buggy to begin with because we’re creating this from scratch. We’ll see how this new law goes over the next year. We may need to come back to the Legislature a year from now and fine-tune it, but we have to take these big bites at it right now and just try to get it up and running.
I’ve got a medical card and I want the dispensaries and growers under state regulation. I want some sort of assurance the product they’re putting out there is the product they claim.
As a person, then, who also wants to see the 502 system succeed, I don’t want dispensaries to be able to undercut the people who are playing by the rules and paying taxes.
I met plenty of people who are legitimate patients and do find real medical help in various forms of cannabis and need it, and it’s truly a good thing for them. At the same time, in too many dispensaries there are these sort of whacky products out there that are unregulated. They don’t show medical marijuana in the right light or even the correct light.
As they come under a regulated system, those crazy names and whacky products and flavors will be filtered out of that system. The basic name products that patients need will still be available.
MV: How did Washington’s medical industry develop into what is today, after first being approved by voters back in 1998?
Barcott: I think it was the growth of the concept of the collective garden and what that could be. We reached a point, I think it was 2010 or 2011, when the state Legislature actually cast a bill to regulate medical marijuana and Gov. (Christine) Gregoire just could not bring herself to sign it.
She said at the time that she couldn’t sign it because she felt she was putting Washington State employees in harm’s way in terms of opening them up to federal charges.
But I don’t believe that at all. Colorado had its own system up and running fine.
I think she just could not bring herself to do what she saw as legitimizing something she did not believe in. Sadly, I believe it was the wrong decision. It did a disservice for the state.
I supported her in 95% of her policies, but not that one.
MV: What are you working on now? What’s your next book?
Barcott: I don’t know what my next book is yet. I would like to continue writing in this area. There are just so many fascinating tendrils that creep out from legal marijuana, from the politics and economics of it to the social and cultural aspects. So I’d like to find a way to continue writing about it, but we’ll see.