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Grow and Give

Can Washington’s Gift Economy in Marijuana Work?

It sounds like an idea a stoner might come up with.

In Washington, D.C., it’s now legal to possess marijuana, to grow it, to smoke it and to give it away. But you’re not allowed to trade in it. You can give your neighbor up to an ounce, but if he gives you money or even bakes you a pie in exchange, that’s illegal.

The District of Columbia has legalized marijuana — but is trying not to create a market in marijuana. It’s aiming for a gift economy, not unlike what you might experience at Burning Man, but permanently.

Other legalizing jurisdictions are taking a more traditional approach. Colorado and Washington State have both established regulated markets in marijuana that look a lot like those many states have to regulate and tax alcohol. District of Columbia council members were expected to do the same until Congress passed a law barring them from spending money to regulate marijuana. That left the city with noncommercial legalization as its only option after voters repealed the law prohibiting marijuana in the district last November.

The district’s lawmakers aren’t happy about the process, but maybe they should be pleased about the outcome. Mark Kleiman, a leading expert on drug policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been arguing for Washington’s “grow-and-give” approach for years. He is one of several researchers affiliated with the RAND Corporation who have been urging states to look for intermediate options between prohibition and commercial legalization. They have urged states to consider approaches like nonprofit cooperatives, a government monopoly on marijuana production or a grow-your-own rule like the one Washington has ended up with, essentially by accident.

Drug prohibition imposes many costs. People go to jail for using and trading in drugs, causing major disruption to individuals’ lives and to communities. Illegal markets breed crime, including violent crime, because people in the drug business can’t use the courts to enforce contracts and settle disputes. And prohibition reduces access to a product that many people enjoy and use responsibly — though it’s not that hard to buy marijuana even where it’s illegal.

But Mr. Kleiman warns that full-scale commercial legalization comes with costs of its own. The main risk is that marijuana businesses will — as alcohol and tobacco companies did — successfully market their products to heavy users who would be better off using less, and that they will resist regulations that discourage problem use.

A recent RAND research brief says 80 percent of marijuana consumption is by daily and near-daily users. “So roughly 80 percent of marijuana companies’ profits would come from marketing to such heavy users, about half of whom currently meet clinical criteria for substance use disorders (either with marijuana itself or another substance, such as alcohol),” it concluded.

Supporters of the Washington approach hope the city will enjoy the benefits of legalization without creating a well-organized commercial machine that encourages people to smoke marijuana. “It’s very elegant, and it does have a lot of merit,” said David Frum, the conservative political commentator and an adviser to Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a group that opposes legalization but favors other drug law reforms. “It does seek to thread a path between the evils of having an industry that creates a lot of dependency and, on the other hand, having a lot of people in jail for issues that are fundamentally of dependency and not moral failing.”

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Signing up for a seed exchange event during a cannabis conference in Washington, D.C., in February.Credit...Alex Wong/Getty Images

Still, Mr. Frum opposes the Washington model, preferring to simply decriminalize it and continue to ban production and distribution of marijuana. He fears that a noncommercial model will not be sustainable: Local officials will fall under the sway of people in the marijuana business who want the opportunity to make profits in a commercial market. He notes that producers in Colorado have already been fiercely resisting restrictions on edible marijuana products, even though they may be attractive to children and lead some consumers (including New York Times columnists) to accidentally overindulge. Calls for commercial legalization are also likely to appeal to lawmakers because commercial legalization generates marijuana tax revenue.

Mr. Kleiman shares Mr. Frum’s fear that commercial legalization advocates will win the day (they’ve won in the last few states where marijuana has been on the ballot, after all). But the question remains: What’s the alternative?

“The only hope to beat commercial legalization is with a successful noncommercial legalization,” Mr. Kleiman says, “because prohibition is over.”

While Mr. Frum objects to “grow-and-give” for opening a dangerous door, some libertarians object that it doesn’t go far enough. Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote in Reason that Washington, D.C., would continue to have a black market in marijuana, as most people would continue to buy illegally because growing your own was inconvenient. She also notes consumers won’t get the quality control that comes with a legalized market.

Mr. Kleiman agrees with Ms. Mangu-Ward that Washington won’t have a true gift economy in marijuana. He expects small-scale illegal sales of the drug to continue, but he isn’t necessarily bothered by it.

“I kind of distinguish between flagrant and discreet drug dealing,” he says. “Discreet drug dealing happens in multipurpose locations indoors. Flagrant drug dealing occurs outdoors or in dedicated locations” — think street corners and crack houses. “Discreet drug dealing doesn’t attract much crime, while a flagrant dealer is a target.”

In other words, Washington’s reform isn’t about making the marijuana trade truly, totally noncommercial. It’s about making the commercial aspects of the marijuana trade mostly harmless, occurring discreetly inside people’s homes, without attendant violence or mass marketing. Mr. Kleiman compares the issue to gambling — your home poker game might be illegal, but isn’t likely to cause violent crime or draw government attention in the way a full-scale gambling operation might.

That’s a theory — but it’s one we’ll get to test over the next few years. If Mr. Kleiman is right about noncommercial legalization, Washington should find success. “You really want to see decreased criminal justice involvement, you want to see an absence of flagrant public dealing and you want to not see the long supply chains and the marketing,” he said. Then, on the usage side, you want to see that problem use hasn’t risen. You can measure that through surveys, though he also proposes a couple of novel ways, including collecting samples from the city’s sewer system or of hair clippings from barbershops and salons, to measure the population-level amount of cannabis metabolites showing up in urine and hair.

If the hair samples start showing a lot more T.H.C. metabolites, we’ll know Washington residents are smoking significantly more weed. Of course, most of those users aren’t problem users, but because the problem users have the highest usage, Mr. Kleiman argues the quantity of metabolites should be a good proxy for the total amount of problem use.

We often hear that state and local governments are “laboratories of democracy,” but in this case, that will be more literally true than usual.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Where Marijuana Is Legal but Isn’t for Sale. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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