Marijuana Grow Quotas

At the moment when marijuana is legalized, demand for growing licenses or quotas will exceed supply, right?

At some point, someone will have to say who gets them.  Who will say?  And how?  

And once the decider decides, what appeals will be allowed?  If appeals are allowed, to whom?

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FDR’s wealth sharing in the tobacco program said government agents decided, and no appeals were allowed.

It’s not a model to follow, but a proof of concept. 

Allocating grow quotas on the basis of claimed prior acreage might not withstand the modern version of Due Process, and anyway, we don’t have a class to favor on that basis..

“Prosperity Road: the New Deal, tobacco, and North Carolina,” by Anthony J. Badger, describes the process.

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Late 1933 into 1934:

Growers had to vote the program in every year.  It based quotas on a rolling average production history. County agents took farmers’ reports of historic production of tobacco.

So the government’s agents had to evaluate whether claims of historic growing were exaggerated.

“[M]ost growers overestimated.” P91 County agents negotiated and adjusted amounts allowed. “Few were able to bring the production records that might have solved the problem.” 91

One practice, by at least one agent, was to list allotments publicly in local stores “and inviting neighbors secretly to inform him in their neighbors were overestimating.”

Once quotas were allocated, “It was a troublesome and time consuming task to measure some 500,000 fields in the cotton and tobacco counties of North Carolina. In a tobacco county like Nash or Pitt as many as ninety compliance supervisors were employed.” 92

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Production during the years 1931-33 was to be the base for tobacco allotments.

Nonsigning farmers got no payments, and paid a tax of 25 percent on their tobacco sales. That rate was chosen by the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. p 73

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Digital technology ought to facilitate sharing the wealth — instead of among farmers, among registered voters, say.