One important difference between credit card buckets and marijuana legalization is that the latter can be done in increments. With credit card buckets, you'd have to produce a complete working system before it benefits a single person. With marijuana legalization, you can make relatively minor changes to the law with immediate benefits which don't have far-reaching repercussions.
For example, the federal government can stop making raids on places that provide medical marijuana to cancer patients. Eric Holder has already announced this, and he's not even in favor of legalization. This has immediate benefit without interfering overly much with the other systems mentioned.
Also, many (though not all) of the issues described are state issues rather than federal ones. Whether you can smoke cigarettes in bars varies by locality, and presumably this would be the same for marijuana.
Ultimately, many of these issues would be decided by the courts rather than the legislature. We have a common law system that thrives on vague laws being interpreted and refined by rulings on specific instances of conflicts between different laws, principles, and common sense.
Obviously I'm hand-waving, and the essay is 100% correct about how difficult this would all be. I've thought about some of these issues before, but others were mentioned that had never occurred to me, and I don't have good answers for many of them.
Still, we can legalize incrementally, let states and localities handle the minutia, and allow the courts as always to hammer out a set of standards over time. This legalization a lot more doable than the impossible-once-you-really-think-about-it credit card buckets.
I think it's a key insight that we can incrementally improve the law, but a credit-card bucket system must be fully implemented before anyone uses it. We can and do use this feature of the US legal system on a near daily basis to make meaningful improvements over time.
However, I think this point is significant: "People will die. It's a certainty. Some people are going to die as a direct consequence of legalization of marijuana." It's okay to release a crappy messaging website and iterate it into goodness, but it's irresponsible to do the same with medical software. In the same way, when people's lives are at stake, we have a responsibility to produce good laws from the start, so even if we don't get it perfectly right immediately, all of the complicated details that Steve brings up have to be thought through, or else there could be major negative consequences during the stabilization period.
'However, I think this point is significant: "People will die. It's a certainty. Some people are going to die as a direct consequence of legalization of marijuana." '
People are already dying as a result of current marijuana laws.
If your current medical software is buggy and causing deaths, you want the replacement to be solid but you also can't wait until you are 100% sure. You need to be sure enough that the consequences, bugs and all, are an improvement.
On the other hand, thinking through the details is not a hallmark of many current laws which already cost lives (e.g., war on drugs, overly conservative regulation of new drugs by FDA). So the hurdle to be met by ironing out the details of changes in laws shouldn't be whether they will cost lives; it should be whether they will cost fewer lives than what currently exists.
For example, the federal government can stop making raids on places that provide medical marijuana to cancer patients. Eric Holder has already announced this, and he's not even in favor of legalization. This has immediate benefit without interfering overly much with the other systems mentioned.
Also, many (though not all) of the issues described are state issues rather than federal ones. Whether you can smoke cigarettes in bars varies by locality, and presumably this would be the same for marijuana.
Ultimately, many of these issues would be decided by the courts rather than the legislature. We have a common law system that thrives on vague laws being interpreted and refined by rulings on specific instances of conflicts between different laws, principles, and common sense.
Obviously I'm hand-waving, and the essay is 100% correct about how difficult this would all be. I've thought about some of these issues before, but others were mentioned that had never occurred to me, and I don't have good answers for many of them.
Still, we can legalize incrementally, let states and localities handle the minutia, and allow the courts as always to hammer out a set of standards over time. This legalization a lot more doable than the impossible-once-you-really-think-about-it credit card buckets.