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To make this vaguely hackerish, I think stevey nailed the stickiness of this problem: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legalized-marijuana.

To make this vaguely hackerish, I think stevey nailed the stickiness of this problem: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legalized-marijuana.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali... (skip to 'What exactly do you mean... "legalization"?' for the portion salient to this article)

Kadin 17y ago
I've read that article before and I don't find it particularly convincing. Implementing any complex piece of legislation is hard. Luckily there are people who specialize in that sort of thing -- we wouldn't be hiring computer programmers to do it, any more than we'd hire policy wonks to code something in C++. If the political will existed to legalize and tax, the actual implementation details, codifying the regulations, wouldn't be trivial but would be significantly less of a hurdle than getting the legislative votes in the first place. What it would probably involve is standing up a new government agency (either at the state or Federal level), or increasing the scope of an existing one, to administer and perform the regulation. That's not exactly black magic; there are actually consultants you can hire who work exclusively in the public sector, managing "stand ups" of new agencies. Lots of things look like impossible tasks, if you're not familiar with them. Imagine what a complex piece of software, or the whole software-development lifecycle, the process of building a major piece of software, is like for someone who's totally unfamiliar with it. You could forgive them for thinking that building anything more complex than Minesweeper is totally impossible. But it's not, and there's a huge body of knowledge within the industry on how to do it right, and how to do it wrong. The same thing exists within the 'industry' (and it really is an industry) of public policy. It's good to appreciate complexity, but not a reason to run screaming away from it. Marijuana legalization is an eminently tractable problem.

Kadin 17y ago

I've read that article before and I don't find it particularly convincing. Implementing any complex piece of legislation is hard. Luckily there are people who specialize in that sort of thing -- we wouldn't be hiring computer programmers to do it, any more than we'd hire policy wonks to code something in C++. If the political will existed to legalize and tax, the actual implementation details, codifying the regulations, wouldn't be trivial but would be significantly less of a hurdle than getting the legislative votes in the first place. What it would probably involve is standing up a new government agency (either at the state or Federal level), or increasing the scope of an existing one, to administer and perform the regulation. That's not exactly black magic; there are actually consultants you can hire who work exclusively in the public sector, managing "stand ups" of new agencies. Lots of things look like impossible tasks, if you're not familiar with them. Imagine what a complex piece of software, or the whole software-development lifecycle, the process of building a major piece of software, is like for someone who's totally unfamiliar with it. You could forgive them for thinking that building anything more complex than Minesweeper is totally impossible. But it's not, and there's a huge body of knowledge within the industry on how to do it right, and how to do it wrong. The same thing exists within the 'industry' (and it really is an industry) of public policy. It's good to appreciate complexity, but not a reason to run screaming away from it. Marijuana legalization is an eminently tractable problem.