What the state is doing, in actuality, is issuing licenses to commit a felony

I enjoy coming across instances that shed light on what seemed like peculiar issues in history.

An example of one such peculiarity was the prevalence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of privateers which were essentially pirates operating under a state license. Intellectually it is of course not so hard to grasp the distinction between pirate and privateer. It is also not hard to understand why the distinction often became unclear in practice. None-the-less, there is something just odd to the modern mind about the whole issue of pirates and privateers.

But perhaps it is because we are blind to our own pirates/privateers issues. We are close to contemporary issues and perhaps fail to see the parallels. This came to me while reading Patrick Radden Keefe's article Buzzkill: Washington State discovers that it’s not so easy to create a legal marijuana economy in the November 18, 2013 issue of the New Yorker.

Washington and Colorado have launched a singular experiment. The Netherlands tolerates personal use of marijuana, but growing or selling the drug is still illegal. Portugal has eliminated criminal sanctions on all forms of drug use, but selling narcotics remains a crime. Washington and Colorado are not merely decriminalizing adult possession and use of cannabis; they are creating a legal market for the drug that will be overseen by the state. In a further complication, the marijuana that is legal in these states will remain illegal in the eyes of the federal government, because the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 forbids the growing and selling of cannabis. “What the state is doing, in actuality, is issuing licenses to commit a felony,” Kleiman says. In late August, after months of silence, the Department of Justice announced that it will not intervene to halt the initiatives in Washington and Colorado. Instead, it will adopt a “trust but verify” approach, permitting the states to police the new market for the drug. Many other states appear poised to introduce legalization measures, and the Obama Administration’s apparent acquiescence surely will hasten this development.

"What the state is doing, in actuality, is issuing licenses to commit a felony" - sounds like the distinction between pirates and privateers to me. And I think we know how well that distinction was maintained and how well that policy served the interests of the respective nations.