Dr. Cian Ó Concubhair:

That is a very good question and one I did try to answer on a few occasions. I have looked into it. The US did not act. I cannot find anything on how quickly the black market disappeared. One criticism you may hear about efforts to legalise cannabis specifically is that there is still a black market. The evidence is really strong that it has dramatically declined. At the beginning of the conversation, no one thought a completely illegal market could be replaced with a legal one overnight. It takes time to develop capacity overnight in the legal market. No matter what, even when there is a stabilised market, there will be illicit production for cultural reasons. The illicit production of cannabis might not be illicit in a regulated, legal model as we might still want to encourage people to produce the product themselves.

In Ireland, many people brew beer. It is not illegal; it is illegal only to distil. There will always be a small percentage of the market that is illegal. I also grew up in County Clare but believe there is less poitín floating around now than when I was a child. There was certainly an awful lot more of it in the 1920s and 1930s, but the reason for that had more to do with poverty and the inability to purchase easily in the lawful market. That seems to be the key driver. Whatever remnants are left in countries like Ireland seem to be more associated with cultural attachment, and that seems to be dying out as well. There is no research on this; I am just giving anecdotal evidence and my own observations. However, I believe one will find in other markets and with other substances that people prefer the lawful market because they do not have time to produce the product themselves. The pinch point tends to be cost.

With tobacco products, we are probably now at a sweet spot in the Irish State between taxing so much that you can perhaps dissuade people from consuming and reinvest in health services and not taxing so much that people do not want to engage with the regulated, legal market. Some states in the US, like Massachusetts, have had difficulty legalising cannabis because their models are overly restrictive. It is very expensive to get a licence to produce cannabis in Massachusetts. The black market has remained larger. What we might characterise as the black market can mean many things. Is it not a violent black market in Massachusetts; it involves individual growers who, although not licensed to sell, are selling informally on the black market. That is more akin to the poitín trade in the west of Ireland, as it has been over the past 50 years. Not having a black market is not necessarily a bad thing if there is not a whole lot of harm associated with it. In this regard, we must ask whether the supply is toxic, which would obviously be a problem. More important, we must ask whether there is violence associated with the black market. There may be some legacy black market if a state decides to regulate some of these substances. The question then concerns how harmful the substance is, how big the market is and the regulatory measures the state needs to adopt to reduce or address it.