Massachusetts legalized recreational cannabis use by ballot measure in 2016, and the state legislature spent two years delaying dispensary openings in order to put together careful regulations to stop weed from becoming … well, too popular. They had some reasonable concerns. When public health types look at alcohol legalization, they see the harms of prohibition replaced by the harms of an alcoholic beverage industry that slowly kills its best customers, leads to plenty of violence & destruction for others nearby, and uses its immense economic power to avoid regulation. There’s a whole genre of stories with the concept “imagine if we covered alcohol the way we cover other drugs,” and they provide a very useful insight into the harms of an underregulated market for abusable substances. Regulators looked at the nascent weed industry and feared that it would wind up building huge profits by generating problematic overusers.
So, they had a lengthy licensing process, plenty of security requirements, high taxes, and restrictions on advertising and promotional deals. The medical market, of course, was considered safe because it treated patients, not recreational smokers, and because access to it was supervised by doctors.
In some ways the regulators have succeeded, because today’s Massachusetts recreational pot customers are mostly tourists, occasional users, and people who haven’t smoked in years (if ever) and want to give it a try. In a rather more important way, that success is irrelevant, because everything they feared about the recreational market was already in place in the medical market.
Getting a medical card costs about $200 and can be done by phone. Mainstream doctors don’t prescribe cannabis, so it’s the realm of specialists who operate cannabis-only clinics, which means nobody is ever denied a card if they ask. Nor is the cost a barrier: medical sales are untaxed, which rapidly makes up the difference for anyone who smokes more than occasionally. Moreover, medical retailers are allowed to deploy a wide range of promotions, including paraphernalia giveaways, Instagram DJ sets, and huge discounts for new and returning customers (excuse me, patients). Many dispensaries offer a 50% discount on the first few hundred dollars worth of purchases, or 5% cash back, or discounts for larger purchases, or all of those. I saw one with coupons for $1 eighths (about a $50 discount) in randomly selected pre-rolled joints, making “buying medicine” into a sort of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory raffle. Imagine Pfizer giving away free Viagra with your Lipitor, or, more alarmingly, the origins of the opioid epidemic in unethical industry marketing.
Fortunately, cannabis is substantially less dangerous than alcohol and opioids. At least, as far as we know. One of the problems with prohibition, you see, is that it was so difficult to study cannabis for so long that we actually don’t know as much as we should about the effects of this very large and rapidly growing industry.
Just wait for the 4/20 holiday specials.
Trademark Madness
Every year around the NCAA basketball tournament, some nontrivial number of urologists do jokey promotions for vasectomies, because it’s a perfect excuse to say “I really should stay on the couch all day watching sports.” Some places include coupons for wings with every vasectomy, or encourage a group of friends to all get snipped together so they can all watch basketball all day. It’s now led to a lawsuit over the trademark “Vasectomy Mayhem” being too similar to March Madness.
Things That Are Bad
Amazon.
Pickup trucks. (See also: stroads and SUVs). (See also: bills to protect drivers who run over protesters).
Somehow, the California Environmental Quality Act.
Police in Minneapolis, London, Chicago, Boston, and Boston again.
Things That Are Good
Resurrecting a fabric lost to colonial depredations.
People who think the U.S. is still this all-conquering dominant hegemon remind me of that guy in Mary Poppins who sings “It’s grand to be an Englishman in 1910”
Noah Smith š (@Noahpinion) March 14, 2021
Joy
Dog plus net equals derp.
Jewish space laser enamel pin, of course.
A fox napping on a skylight.
This komondor.
Cat “helping.”
Our vegetable love shall grow …. a husky?
A different dog with an alarmingly long nose. (Bonus: video of nose in action!)
Secretly Ironic 
