George Rebane
Pro-S supporters and community leaders have been denying Nevada County voters the relevant data with which to decide on how to vote for the Measure S medical marijuana (MMJ) initiative. They have been unwilling to count the number of legitimate MMJ users in the county. Not only that, they maintain that such data is impossible to get, none of the voters’ business, and irrelevant to making a reasoned decision on how to vote on the issue in November.
Leading pro-S advocate Ms Patricia Smith, president of the local Americans for Safe Access chapter, has been asked by RR and other media (KNCO) people about the size of the county’s medical marijuana consuming population. Her estimates have ranged into the multiple tens of thousands in a county in which less than 100,000 people live. This commentator has argued that such numbers are a bamboozle on the voters and nowhere close to reality.
The data now issuing from Colorado’s experience with legalizing recreational marijuana (RMJ) use is very revealing and applicable to the situation in Nevada County. The just out November 2014 issue of Reason magazine contains a long and informative article detailing what has been happening with MMJ and RMJ in Colorado since voters legalized RMJ sales and consumption.
An interesting result was that consumption of MMJ did not plummet as expected after the legalization of RMJ, but actually increased due to cost factors. But that is not the point I want to make in this post. Colorado has no trouble counting and reporting its MMJ users. This May the total came to 115,210 as reported by Colorado’s Department of Public Health and Environment. Colorado has a population of about 5,250,000. There is no reason to think that Colorado’s lax MJ laws minimize the number of its MMJ users (both legitimate and frauds), so the ratio of Colorado’s users to its population – 0.022 – should apply to Nevada County’s 100,000 residents. This puts our county’s MMJ users into the vicinity of approximately 2,200 patients, not the tens of thousands claimed by pro-S promoters led by Ms Smith.
And isn’t it odd that an entire state can easily track its legal MMJ users, but our county with a handful of prescribing physicians cannot? This is a repeated call for the numbers relevant to our county's consumption of medical marijuana.
The bottom line here is that there is no epidemic of MMJ users in the county, and most certainly there is no shortage of supply for the arguably small number of the county’s MMJ patients as claimed by Measure S supporters. If my estimate is materially in error, it is up to the pro-S people to present evidence that supports that contention.
(For more read 'Colorado's Shadow Tourist Boom' by Jacob Sullum in Reason magazine, Nov 2014, Volume 46, page 30.)
[6oct14 update] The comment stream to the above post was immediate, emotional, and irrational, yet nevertheless expected, valuable, and worthy of examination on its own merits.
First, readers who recall some of their training in science will recognize the line of reasoning that obtained the 2,200 estimate is based on what we in science call the Copernican Argument (see also the Copernican place, Copernican moment, Copernican part, …). Without rehashing the history, the Copernican Argument is a powerful starting point for estimations and explanations of existential phenomena about which few specifics are known. In the case of MMJ usage, the CArg is that Nevada County’s MMJ experience does not fall far from the aggregate of such MMJ experiences in American jurisdictions from which the Colorado experience is but a more fully known sample. And therefore, absent other data, the Colorado experience can in many ways serve as a proxy to estimating some of the same kinds of parameters that hold in our neck of the woods. Most certainly the ratio of MMJ users within a population is the most straightforward parameter that can be ‘transferred’ to estimate the approximate size of Nevada County’s similar population.
Of course, to those ignorant of such things, this all seems like mumbo jumbo or some kind of black magic. Be that as it may.
The second aspect of the comments that is worthy of note again illustrates the deep and (I maintain) irreconcilable chasm that exists between the liberal mind and other modes of thought and reasoning. Here we see a commenter, who we may assume typifies a ‘liberal thinker’, answer the legitimate demand for minimal data to support the adoption of Measure S by counter demanding a laundry list of MMJ related data (some ludicrous) from the opponents of S as some kind of argumentative pro quid quo. Not only that, but such data must be forthcoming before the pro-S faction even recognizes the need for knowing the approximate magnitude of the ‘MMJ problem’ the new Measure S is to alleviate.
The long known and reasonable sequence of such arguments has always been that when some party/parties propose a change to any established order/process/construction, then it is incumbent on them to provide the people of the established order with substantive arguments as to why their new way is better and should replace the old. But the modern liberal mind no longer recognizes such a protocol (another devastating result of Great Society’s educational system?), and seeks to change things simply on the basis of their say so, advancing the empty proposition that their new proposal will in some unknown way make things better, more equitable, more just, or more something. Examples of the fruits of such thinking over the last forty years abound in our land, and the insanity grows daily. Here we see just a small part of the wave of unreason washing over America.
[7oct14 update] Regular readers will be happy to know that RR got its moment in the sun about our coverage and voluminous debate over the Measure S initiative. We are prominently featured in the 7oct14 Union’s lead article on page one (here). For readers new to RR wishing to read the entire series on Measure S, I have collected the permalinks below –
Medical Marijuana Cultivation Initiative – Nevada County Ballot Measure S (updated 6sep14)
Marijuana Ordinance Utility/Criteria
Thoughts on Marijuana and Measure S
Medical Marijuana, Property Rights, and Government Access
Measure S – The Numbers Please! (updated 6oct14)
[8oct14 update] The comments of pro-S worthies Messrs BradC and APatriot, starting with my 551pm comment and jumping to BradC’s 1050am, open a new front in the Measure S debate regarding the strong claim by pro-S that the purpose of S reaches significantly beyond the adequate supply and access of MMJ to ONLY Nevada County’s legitimate MMJ patients. It turns out that Measure S, through its lax provisions for MMJ grows and enforcemet, is also intended to launch a resurgent MMJ export business to the remainder of the state as allowed by existing state law.
Here I want to respond to the somewhat desperate and off-the-point responses from Ms Patricia Smith (322pm) and Mr APatriot (404pm). The quoted material is in their words, starting with Ms Smith –
“…you complain over numbers that are not substantiated and then you have the audacity to declare unilaterally that NC grows enough medicine to supply all the patients in California.”
My declaration was to make a point about the enormous amount of MJ grown in NC so that claims of the lack of MMJ supply in the county could be put in perspective. I did admit to being off the mark on the total amount, but that was not the point important to voters. I never complained about “unsubstantiated” numbers, just of their total absence and the humorous attempt to throw the CDC under the bus for Ms Smith’s obviously bad arithmetic or gross ignorance of the county’s population.
“The first thing our elected officials say when we bring up lack of access is ‘go to a dispensary in Sacramento.’ ”
If going to Sacramento is a hardship for MMJ users, then Measure S would have provided a service in specifying that such dispensaries can be opened up in Nevada County. Apparently it is not that big of a problem.
“What you refuse to acknowledge is that most of the marijuana being grown in NC is NOT medicine.”
Pattie, who taught you how to read??? I have proclaimed exactly the opposite in this debate cycle and for many years before that. Your campaign would do better if you gave your opposition credit for more brains. EVERYONE knows that Nevada County’s RMJ crop swamps its legal MMJ crop – please, get a grip. And no one in the anti-S camp wants legitimate MMJ users denied their product. Unfortunately, S does not provide for the local manufacture and convenient dispensing of all the variants of MMJ you describe. However, 2349 can be amended to do just that if you make a believable case for it (and yes, that will require numbers).
“One cannot ignore the number of patients that visit our local doctors who write MMJ recommendations. This would indicate a substantially higher number of active patients than you want to admit. Again, it is impossible to get a factually accurate number for many reasons, but mostly because there is no central registration collecting agency to verify these numbers. I'll leave the guessing games to you.”
A properly written S would have prescribed a “central registration agency” (the county’s health department) for the collection of such data from the county’s prescribing physicians. The data is available and easily collected, as I have pointed out numerous times. And the “guessing games” appear as such to you only because of your inexperience in the procedures used for estimation in all fields of science. Were you to continue in this enterprise of advocating public policy changes, I’d recommend getting familiar with them.
We continue with the revealing offerings of Mr APatriot’s 404pm –
“No George that is your conjecture, opinion and hallucination. …”
Have no idea what the man’s referent is.
“Only the No on S posse seems to be afraid of facts. You constantly ignore the reasons S is an improvement. You wanted reasons, I gave you sound agricultural practices, no response.”
No one has any idea of what facts the anti-S people are afraid of since almost no facts have been presented by the pro-S promoters. A dissertation about “agricultural practices” deserves no response since under 2349 the number of visibly healthy MJ grows in the county is legion. If S would call for zoning set asides for the commercial growing of MMJ, then we would be getting somewhere. But what S promotes is simply the ability for surreptitious growing of RMJ under the MMJ mantle. And, of course, you’re right that I do have only a layman’s knowledge of growing MJ picked up from various presentations on the topic. But that again is neither the point of S vs 2349, nor the salient factor to consider in casting your vote because it seems that everyone has cracked the code on growing MJ.
“You also seem to think the title Dr. makes you a medical expert, from the manner and content of your dosage claims.”
That gratuitous crack doesn’t deserve an answer, it only confirms your poor reading ability.
“How about you tell US how many times the B of S has met to adjust, revise and improve what exists. They haven't, they lied, and they continue to fall short.”
Had you paid attention, then you would know that I already did. 2349 is readily amendable, and has seen a number of amendments by the BoS (you can download them here). Measure S is not amendable, but requires another election in which voters will be presented another poured-in-concrete initiative to grieve over. The state’s voters passed such an initiative in Prop 215. And what it wound up doing was creating a deluge of (still ongoing) lawsuits across the state’s jurisdictions that in desperation sought to define what the proposition left unsaid or on which it was silent. Now the pro-S crowd wants to revisit that same plague on the citizens of Nevada County with a loosey-goosey replacement of a working and amendable county ordinance that defines the growing and use of MMJ, while it balances the nuisance concerns of the growers’ neighbors.
