In Let Those Dopers Be, Norm Stamper, the former chief of the Seattle Police Department, answers the question, How would ‘regulated legalization’ work?
- Permit private companies to compete for licenses to cultivate, harvest, manufacture, package and peddle drugs.
- Create a new federal regulatory agency (with no apologies to libertarians or paleo-conservatives).
- Set and enforce standards of sanitation, potency and purity.
- Ban advertising.
- Impose (with congressional approval) taxes, fees and fines to be used for drug-abuse prevention and treatment and to cover the costs of administering the new regulatory agency.
- Police the industry much as alcoholic beverage control agencies keep a watch on bars and liquor stores at the state level. Such reforms would in no way excuse drug users who commit crimes: driving while impaired, providing drugs to minors, stealing an iPod or a Lexus, assaulting one’s spouse, abusing one’s child. The message is simple. Get loaded, commit a crime, do the time.
(Hat tip to Reason’s Hit and Run.)