A Nudge Toward Temperance: User-Set Consumption Limits as an Element of Cannabis Policy

Abstract

Approximately four million people in the United States currently report that they have difficulty controlling their own cannabis use. That number has multiplied by approximately a factor of seven over the past quarter-century. The move toward legal availability of cannabis risks a continuation of rising trends in the rate of cannabis use disorder. Cannabis, like other “temptation goods” (Banerjee & Mullainathan, 2010; Caulkins, 2017), can generate problems because of the challenges it creates for individual decision-making. One approach to limiting such risks is to provide “nudges toward temperance”: designing the supply system with an eye to helping consumers align their daily choices with their long-term interests. A user-determined cap on purchases – a user-set quota system, or USQS – could form an element of such an approach. Under a USQS, cannabis would be sold only to registered users, each of whom would be asked to establish a personal monthly quantity limit. Vendors would deny sales exceeding any user’s stated quota. This approach to regulation would – to an extent not easily determined in advance – reduce the incidence of diagnosable cannabis problems while respecting personal autonomy: even, in a sense, enhancing it. If such a system were to succeed in the case of cannabis, it would lay a foundation for considering whether a USQS might be usefully added to the current array of alcohol-control measures, and in particular whether a user-set quota could substitute for the current prohibition of alcohol for those between 18 and 21. The same idea might be extended to some other currently-illicit drugs, with the goal of eliminating illicit markets without the upsurge in problem use that would otherwise be an expected result of legalization.