I was born in Rogers Park, Chicago. When I abandoned college (one of the times), I moved back to work in a Greek and Albanian restaurant and live with my grandparents. I used to enjoy sitting at the breakfast table with them and reading the Tribune, which often carried stories of city and downstate corruption. My grandfather told stories of local aldermen spending $1mm to win $70k jobs (still happening), and recounted the sagas of the state’s jailed governors (there were four in his time). This kind of stuff is endemic to Illinois, the most corrupt state in the nation by evidence and acclamation. It’s Chinatown.
Because these stories of graft and malfeasance are personally interesting to me, and because I’m a cannabis business lawyer, I thoroughly enjoyed this gem of a post last week by Thomas Howard, Esq., on LinkedIn:
Do I trust Mr. Howard’s research, and his math? I want to — he’s a lawyer and “licensing nerd” after all. Of course, nothing I wrote above about Illinois would be admissible as evidence of a lottery fix if we were in court; and neither would anything Mr. Howard wrote (although he is closer). You have to prove it. But the lottery has been rife with problems already, explained away as “clerical oversights” and leading to at least six filed lawsuits. If Mr. Howard’s data are correct, we should see more of them soon on theories spanning from civil rights to administrative process. In the meantime, here are a few takeaways.
Cannabis License Lotteries Are a Bad Idea
Cannabis license lotteries invariably lead to litigation, as a quick Google search will show going back at least as far as 2014 in states like Washington and Massachusetts. Lotteries in general are a problematic tool to deal with scarce goods, as shown in categories from housing to visas. With cannabis, the government both creates and regulates the scarcity in real time, so it’s probably more analogous to visas than housing. Said another way: with cannabis, public policy doesn’t meld with market factors over a long period to create a limited class of goods. The government just says, “we are only going to issue X amount of cannabis licenses, and you all get to fight for them.”
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