Follow the Marijuana Money Trail

It should come as no surprise that the most vocal opponents to any rollback of marijuana policy are those making money on the growth of the industry.

Or that the loudest proponents of new legislation, including lawmakers, may be looking to line their pockets through various private investments in pot-related businesses.

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The Washington Post this week published an op-ed, “The Trump administration’s nonsensical stance on marijuana,” by Sam Kamin, the Vicente Sederberg professor of marijuana law and policy at the University of Denver. Kamin makes the case for declassifying marijuana as a Schedule I drug, pointing out that President Trump has been sympathetic toward those who use marijuana medicinally. And if that’s the case, then it should not be listed alongside heroin and LSD.

“It should be pretty obvious why he doesn’t want federal law enforced. His job depends on a thriving industry,” said one industry analyst.

He wrote: “Schedule I drugs have no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse; as a result their production and sale are prohibited nationwide, regardless of state laws to the contrary. Thus, if the new administration is serious about making marijuana available to medical patients, it could reschedule marijuana to make its use legal by patients around the country. Currently, medical users of marijuana are in violation of federal law, putting their employment, access to government benefits and parental rights at risk even in the absence of a federal crackdown.”

He went on to point out other potential benefits of marijuana, including how it could help reverse the epidemic of opioid abuse and deaths, and the limits of law enforcement in enforcing current marijuana laws anyway.

Related: The Risks of Recreational Weed

Kamin’s job as a law professor at the University of Denver, however, is funded by Vicente-Sederburg, the biggest marijuana industry consulting firm in the country.

“So it should be pretty obvious why he doesn’t want federal law enforced,” said Dr. Kevin Sabet, president and CEO of Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), based in Washington, D.C. “His job depends on a thriving industry.”

The playbook here, Sabet and his colleagues point out, isn’t anything new. All one has to do is look to the history of Big Tobacco to see how the ongoing push for the legalization of marijuana will look — and where some of the inside players may be hiding.

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A steady trickle of former marijuana industry regulators are leaving or have left their jobs to make considerably more money as industry consultants. So those who used to help enforce the law are now being hired away to help companies somehow work their way around it. Academic chairs or professorships, such as Kamin’s, are being funded by marijuana, just as R.J. Reynolds did at Duke, said Jeffrey Zinsmeister, vice president and director of government relations at SAM.

Even Dr. Dan Morhaim, who fought to legalize medicinal use in his home state of Maryland, now admits he should have been more transparent about his role in a medical marijuana company. Morhaim, it turns out, is the clinical director for a company called Doctor’s Orders, which is seeking a license from the state to dispense medical marijuana.

Related: Regulators Get Cozy with Cannabis

“In states with legal marijuana, we are reliving the painful history of our experience with Big Tobacco,” Sabet told LifeZette. “They’re targeting minority communities to sell their products and  —  increasingly  —  donating campaign cash to politicians in an effort to push back against even the most sensible regulations designed to protect public health and safety. While advocates are quick to tout tax revenue as a counterbalance to this arrangement, like with the lottery, this is not materializing. In Washington State, over half of the revenue promised for drug prevention and treatment programs never came about. And in Colorado, bureaucracy to regulate the industry continues to consume a large percentage of the revenue made.”