How would a crackdown backfire? By producing — immediately in Colorado, and eventually in other states — an atomized, anarchic, state-legalized but unregulated marijuana market that federal drug enforcers lack the manpower to contain and the legal power to force the states to contain.
Consider how a federal effort to abort the state experiment would unfold in Colorado, where the voters (unlike those in Washington) chose to create both a state-regulated marijuana industry and another, largely unregulated, one…
If the administration exercises its broad prosecutorial discretion to allow the state-regulated market to operate without federal interference, that’s where most users will get their marijuana. Market forces will keep the grow-your-own-and-share market small.
But if the administration puts Colorado’s state-regulated marijuana sector out of business — as it probably could do, since that sector would consist of a limited number of easily identified operators — the grow-your-own-and-share market could well expand to huge proportions.
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