Mark Kleiman’s summer engrossed in Washington’s marijuana policies earned him a new nickname – the Pot Czar.
“He hates being called that,” Kleiman’s colleague Beau Kilmer said with a laugh.
Kleiman, a public policy professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, recently returned to UCLA after advising the state of Washington on how to regulate cannabis now that it has been legalized in the state.
After studying the effects and social consequences of drugs for decades, Kleiman said he was excited about the opportunity to shape the marijuana policies for one of only two states in the country to legalize the recreational drug, the other being Colorado.
“This is truly a first in terms of drug policy,” he said.
In 2012, Washington voters chose to legalize and tax small amounts of marijuana-related products, with the proceeds going to healthcare and substance abuse education and prevention programs, according to the Seattle Times.
Soon after it was approved, the State Liquor Control Board began looking for a group to gather data and help advise it while they implemented the new policy, Kleiman said.
After hearing about the search through a friend, Kleiman and several other experts formed a group, named BOTEC, and applied for the job, Kleiman said.
Hundreds of groups applied for the opportunity to be involved with creating Washington’s marijuana policies, said Randy Simmons, deputy director of the Washington State Liquor Control Board.
The state dwindled the list down to three teams but the people and talent involved in BOTEC, set the group apart and got them the job, Simmons said.
The team gathered data and information and even proposed certain ideas the team thought was best for implementation, Simmons said.
Kleiman said the role involved a lot of uncharted territory.
“We had no history or knowledge on this kind of subject, so their data and information was invaluable,” Simmons added.
The team broke down different marijuana markets in Washington by county, measured the risk of marijuana overdose and proposed different methods for limiting the amount and strength of marijuana that can be sold, Kleiman said.
Simmons said some of the team’s ideas, while good, couldn’t be done politically or practically.
“He had a brilliant idea to limit cannabis production by THC levels, but the state has no real ability to track every product’s THC levels,” he said. “Their group got to work in theory, but we had to work in reality.”
THC is the chemical that gives the ‘high’ effect to marijuana.
Kilmer, co-director of drug policy at the RAND corporation and also on the team, said his knowledge of game theory came not from school, but from conversations with Kleiman, who has more than 25 years of experience with drug policies.
After graduating from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government with a Ph.D. in public policy, Kleiman has been studying drug policy because he thought it seemed like an interesting area of study.
He began his work in drug policy in the late 1970s, when a report was released that claimed that 10.5 percent of high school seniors used cannabis daily. That report set off a series of moral panics about drugs, continuing with other drug panics throughout the 1980s, he said.
“My goal in drug policy is to minimize the social damage done by drugs,” Kleiman said.
While it presents an opportunity, some of the changes in Washington’s drug policy have left Kleiman a bit uneasy.
One of his biggest concerns about Washington is that the commercial sale of cannabis will turn existing medicinal marijuana stores into commercial chains, he said.
He added that he prefers a public monopoly, or state-owned agency that would be in charge of cannabis sales.
Since much of any addictive product’s industry is based upon repeat customers, profits build off of creating addiction, Kleiman said.
Kleiman said the choice is whether people want the money made off of addictions to flow into the private sector or the public sector, and the latter is typically the safer choice.
“Washington will become an example to look to for any future questions on cannabis legalization and its effects,” he said.