NorthwestMarch 20, 2013

Washington introduces BOTEC as pot consultant for implementing legalization law

GENE JOHNSON of the Associated Press
Steven Davenport (center), project manager for BOTEC Analysis Corp., takes questions from reporters Tuesday as he is introduced in Olympia, along with other members of the team who are the tentative winners of the bidding process to be the official legal marijuana consultants for Washington state.
Steven Davenport (center), project manager for BOTEC Analysis Corp., takes questions from reporters Tuesday as he is introduced in Olympia, along with other members of the team who are the tentative winners of the bidding process to be the official legal marijuana consultants for Washington state.Associated Press

OLYMPIA - Green thumb? Check. Extensive knowledge of the black market? Check.

Throw in impeccable academic credentials and decades of experience with government agencies, and you have Washington's marijuana consultant - a team advising officials on all things pot as they develop rules for the state's new industry in legal, heavily taxed marijuana.

The Washington Liquor Control Board introduced Massachusetts-based BOTEC Analysis Corp. as the presumptive winner of the consultant contract during a news conference Tuesday. The team is led by a University of California, Los Angeles, public policy professor and includes a former executive of the company that is the sole licensed supplier of medical marijuana in the Netherlands. It also includes researchers with the RAND Corp. who will help figure out how much marijuana state-licensed growers should produce.

"These are, by far, the top consultants available," said Randy Simmons, who oversees the implementation of the legal weed law for the board. "We're serious about doing this the right way."

Washington and Colorado last year became the first states to pass laws legalizing the recreational use of marijuana and setting up systems of state-licensed growers, processors and retail stores where adults 21 and older can walk in and buy up to an ounce of heavily taxed cannabis. Sales could begin at the end of the year.

The votes left state officials with a daunting task: figuring out how to build a huge pot industry from scratch. The state's Liquor Control Board must determine how many growers and stores there should be, how much pot should be produced, how it should be packaged, and how it should be tested to ensure people don't get sick.

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The board is doing a lot of its own research, with buttoned-up bureaucrats traveling to grow operations in California and Colorado as well as within Washington state. But the consultant's advice will also be important. The state is aiming to produce just enough marijuana to meet current demand: Producing too little would drive up prices and help the black market flourish, while producing too much could lead to excess pot being trafficked out of state.

BOTEC - it stands for "back of the envelope calculations" - is a 30-year-old think tank headed by Mark Kleiman, a UCLA public policy professor with a doctorate from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. The firm has evaluated government programs and provided consulting relating to drug abuse, crime and public health. It studied the results of an effort to crack down on heroin dealers in Lynn, Mass., and in the early 1990s advised the Office of National Drug Control Policy on drug-demand reduction programs.

Kleiman has written several books on drug policy and crime, including "Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know," and he has argued that states can't legalize marijuana - federal officials would never stand for it.

"Pot dealers nationwide - and from Canada, for that matter - would flock to California to stock up," he wrote in an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times in 2010, when California was considering legalizing marijuana. "There's no way on Earth the federal government is going to tolerate that. Instead, we'd see massive federal busts of California growers and retail dealers, no matter how legal their activity was under state law."

For that reason, some marijuana advocates questioned how committed his team would be to carrying out the will of the voters. But Alison Holcomb, the author of Washington's new law, said the choice of a consultant who isn't a pot cheerleader sent a message that the state is taking its responsibilities seriously.

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