By these expedients, state governments are in effect responding to the public’s growing opposition to the old regime of arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment by creating a legalized arrangement in which the governments themselves will rig the markets and skim off a large part of the earnings of sellers via fees and taxation. Thus, the state governments are turning themselves into de facto landlords of drug-dealer sharecroppers: the producers that grow, process, and sell marijuana will be required to pay the government what amounts to a share of the income. Thus, while continuing to wage the old war on participants in the markets for cocaine, heroin, and other forbidden drugs, the state governments will embed themselves in the marijuana segment of the drug markets as a kind of modern lord of the manor, requiring that the peasants pony up tribute of various sorts and comply with the lord’s dictates in regard to the nature of the industry’s organization and operation. In this setup the government of each state with “liberalized” marijuana laws will be, to put it simply, the biggest drug lord of all.