Marijuana trailblazer points a way forward for Thailand

After California’s vote to legalise marijuana, Los Angeles’ Venice Beach may be a vision of the future. Along the oceanfront boardwalk of the famous counterculture capital, people dressed in medical-style scrubs offer medical marijuana cards, which enable bearers to buy pot legally, as passers-by puff on spliffs unconcerned with police nearby.
A few blocks inland, green crosses outside storefronts indicate not pharmacies but medical marijuana dispensaries.
Marijuana has been legal for medical use here for 20 years, and possession of small amounts was decriminalised in 2011. Many Californians, particularly in Venice, smoke it as casually as people elsewhere light up a cigarette, with or without a medical prescription. 
But California’s vote for legalisation on November 8, rooted in concerns about social justice and spurred by billions in potential profits, moves the state’s cannabis courtship to a whole new level.
Starting immediately, adults in California can now possess up to one ounce (28 grams) of marijuana or eight grams of extracts, and grow and consume it at home. For now, they will still need medical marijuana licenses to buy it legally, but under the new laws, the state must begin licensing retail stores by the end of 2017.
Marijuana has recently become legal in four western states –Colorado, Washington, Alaska and Oregon, as well as the capital Washington. Three more, Massachusetts, Maine and Nevada, legalised it this month. But the addition of California – home to more than 12 per cent of the US population and with an economy larger than France or Brazil – changes the game, according to experts on both sides of the issue.
California lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom, the head of a commission on marijuana policy and a proponent of the change, said California’s vote was “the beginning of the end of the war on marijuana in the United States”. Carla Lowe, head of the prominent activist group Citizens Against Legalising Marijuana, says she fears California’s money, size and prominence would mean legalisation there would set an example for the rest of the country.
“If California falls for it, the rest of the nation will follow,” she says. Marijuana is by no means new in California. Farmers in the state’s northern “Emerald Triangle” have been supplying US consumers – legal and illegal – for decades. In 1996, the state was the first to allow marijuana for medical use. More than 750,000 Californians have medical marijuana cards, according to an estimate by the Marijuana Policy Project. Now, 28 US states allow medical use of marijuana, and more than 20 per cent of the US population lives in a place where the drug is fully legal under state law.
The data shows that people are taking advantage of it.
ArcView, a market research firm specialised in the marijuana business estimates the US market could grow from $5.7 billion last year to as much as $21 billion by 2020 – with California making up more than one-third of the total.
By comparison, the country’s largest cigarette maker, Altria, sold $25 billion worth of tobacco in all 50 US states in 2015.
Cigarette smoking is on the decline – only one in six US adults smokes tobacco, compared to one in five in 2005, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
Marijuana use, by contrast, is increasing, with one in eight US adults saying they used the drug in 2016, according to the Gallup polling organisation, which has been surveying Americans about marijuana for more than 40 years.
It’s no surprise then that attitudes are changing about marijuana too. Sixty per cent of Americans support legalisation, according to Gallup, the highest rate since its surveys began.
The drug remains illegal under US federal law, but the justice department under President Barack Obama has deferred to states’ rights to set their own marijuana laws, and has considerably relaxed enforcement.
The future of that hands-off policy under US president-elect Donald Trump is unclear. While Trump has said he supports medical marijuana and has suggested he backs states’ rights to legalise, the officials who are likely to direct law enforcement  in his administration do not.
But the growing marijuana business and the revenue it can provide may have a defender in Trump’s inner circle, too. Among the investors joining in the California “green gold rush” is Silicon Valley tycoon Peter Thiel, a prominent Trump supporter whose Founders Fund has invested $75 million in marijuana businesses – and who has signed on as an informal advisor to the next White House.