Looking at how much money Colorado is raking in, I honestly think it's just a matter of time before other states fall in line with legalizing marijuana. Awkward banking situation be damned.
$52 million revenue for a state with $28500 million in expenditures is a drop in the bucket.
However it looks like they spent $770 million on corrections - probably with a sizable portion spent on drug enforcement. Or would drug related incarceration mostly be paid by the federal government?
I agree with you that the incentive to tax marijuana is high due to the revenue potential for power groups within the state.
Others suggest that marijuana should be legalized so that the state can reap tax revenues, as if the state is a creature whose feeding is a virtue in and of itself. I find this puzzling, as taxation an entirely independent concept to legalization. Attaching the two issues together seems unnecessary.
The taxes on plants in the various states seem pretty high, and various sources tell me that the retail prices are still not much lower than the previous black market prices. These taxes, especially given how high they are, seem like they are destined to produce the same problems of prohibition.
Adding that high tax was always about winning the support of a broad coalition of interest groups and voters that was necessary to push the bill through, at least that was the case in Washington. There were plenty of people who, while not strongly opposed to marijuana, would have just as soon left it illegal if not for the promise of some sort of broader benefit to non-users in the form of additional tax revenue. Still, I agree with your fundamental point that it is a shame that we feel the need to justify something which just makes good policy sense by using tax dollars as a carrot.
Incidentally, in Seattle at least, the high taxes and difficult restrictions on where marijuana can be sold means that a lot of people there still get there weed the same way they did before: either through the more loosely regulated dispensary system or illegal growers.
But vices are usually heavily taxed. (Ok, sure, some of this is medicinal, but let's be frank) So, i don't see much of an issue with it.
Leveraging taxes makes this appealing to people for whom it might not be.
As for the prices being similar to black market, that may be so, for now, but there is one thing which should give it an advantage and that's quality control, aka, branding.
And, as others have pointed out, legalizing it, eliminates the social cost of prosecuting what were once crimes --that's a big advantage.
In Denver, the weed sales tax is upwards of 21% with a previous 15% excise tax from cultivator to retail outlet.
In Colorado, it's less than 8% tax on a 6 pack of beer and the great majority of this is a federal tax.
Weed is demonstrably safer and thus less sinful than alcohol and tobacco. I dislike how easily the tax argument is received. If you can show a relationship that adds to healthcare costs then by all means institute sin taxes, including for soda. But if you are only making a moral judgement about what not to do, then I think the argument is without merit.
It's not an argument from first principles about what weed "should" cost. It's about what people will accept. People are used to weed costing relatively infinite money (i.e. it can cost you your freedom and no amount of money can replace that). Therefore, even expensive weed seems cheap by comparison and feels like a win for consumers.
Likewise, expressways are massively expensive to build and maintain, but we're used to driving on them for free, so charging even a small toll that doesn't fully recover the costs feels expensive and is widely resisted.
While the "sin tax" is a philosophy that some people might prescribe to, the main incentive for the tax revenue is mainly the ability for the government to make money and fund whatever the government wants to fund with it. I don't think morality enters into it.
Tobacco (which gets mostly smoked) and liquor can be heavily taxed, depending on jurisdiction, so if AKs want to put 10% or 50% or 120% tax rate and pass that resolution, what's the problem?
As to why beer might be taxed less, I think some of these things are due to history. Beer has been a mainstream vice since prehistory. If you were to introduce "New Vice #47", I'm going to guess, it would get a relatively high tax too, no matter how mild it might be to your health.
By the way, not that it means anything, but I'd be totally for high taxes on beer and sugary drinks.
eh, if the argument is go to jail or pay some extra money, I'd rather accept the lesser evil. Even more so if it is helping states pay for socially beneficial programs with lots of positive externalities.
And let's be frank, there's still lots of black market sales in Colorado, for people that want lesser quality marijuana at cheaper prices. Many people don't mind the premium markup and the taxes for the convenience, legality and quality of legalized pot.
Are you saying you don't have an issue with the taxation of vices, or that you do not have an issue with the taxation of marijuana because the taxation of vices is already common?
I agree with both ways of framing it. I don't have a problem with taxing vice --gambling, prostitution, drugs (alcohol, tobacco, MJ), including some goods of dubious utility, sugar, etc. Taxation of such vice being common, makes it an easy sell. There's a frame of reference, precedence.
Unless it can be shown to have adverse health effects I'm not sure I would agree with taxation either, that said. Baby steps. Taking it from omg-lock-your-doors-theyre-doing-marijuana illegal, to on the same prohibited level as tobacco or alcohol is easier to digest for more conservative people.
Once it's legal and we've aborted this embarrassing War On Drugs, we can begin to address the rationale behind the taxation of harmless vices. It's a little bit of a bait and switch, if you think of it in the long-term, but don't tell them that.
> as if the state is a creature whose feeding is a virtue in and of itself.
This isn't why people suggest it. People suggest it because they recognize many Americans are incapable of seeing the value of doing something if there is no economic incentive for it. So they come up with an economic incentive.
> "It is unimaginable to believe that if heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, or even over-the-counter medications were being distributed in 23 states and the District of Columbia, Congress and the President would abdicate all regulatory authority to those jurisdictions, and then cut off all funds … to intervene in related distribution activities"
What does this quote mean? I'm having trouble parsing it properly.
Also, in the US, methamphetamine is a legal Schedule II drug for ADHD and obesity.
They're saying that if 23 states had legalized heroin then the government would have intervened to stop them. So the fact that the government hasn't intervened shows that it isn't as dangerous as other schedule I drugs, and therefore shouldn't be schedule I.
(Even though as you say cocaine and methamphetamine are both legal by prescription, and heroin is basically legal as well in the form of morphine, but whatever.)
IANAL, but I'd be very surprised if this case ends up doing anything. The case is subject to "rational basis" review, the weakest form of review. As is mentioned in the article, the government correctly argues that congress doesn't even have to be right, it just has to have a "rational basis" for its action. In fact, the so long as the court can imagine a rational basis of action, even one that is totally unrelated to the legislative history, the government can prevail.
The government can easily argue a rational basis by saying "Drugs are bad mkay? While there may be some medicinal uses (which we deny), even if they existed we think that there are better substitutes distilled by pharmaceutical companies in each case presented by the plaintiffs. The government has a legitimate interest in promoting the health of the nation. Therefore, by demonstrating a legitimate interest and precluding medicinal uses, schedule I is rational."
Not that I believe this is good policy mind you, just that arguing under these conditions is unlikely to lead to change.
What does it realistically mean if this judge finds that marijuana is improperly scheduled? Does marijuana become default legal? Does it defer to the state laws? Does the process of re-scheduling start? etc.
Sorry if it's a stupid question, but, what happens with all the people in prison for possession of marijuana? Do they still need to serve their full sentence, can they be released now that it is legal?
It's all the poor, backward Southern states that really could use the tax revenue. Alaska, Colorado and Oregon were already economically successful states before legalization. Hopefully the dominos will start falling and we can put this 'reefer madness' behind us.
> Private prison companies, however, essentially admit that their business model depends on locking up more and more people. For example, in a 2010 Annual Report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) stated: “The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by . . . leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices . . . .” As incarceration rates skyrocket, the private prison industry expands at exponential rates, holding ever more people in its prisons and jails, and generating massive profits.
And it's also true, though perhaps to a less consequential extent, of public prisons. You still have prison employees and management drawing salaries and construction companies building public prisons, after all.
Right, except in the first case the state receives revenue from marijuana taxation, and in the second case the state pays private prisons taxpayer money...
Its true that locking people up costs taxpayer money. But there are people of influence who have positioned themselves to control and receive that money.
They were talking about it on NPR. Basically, you take a risk on the legality of marijuana to get larger gains in comparison to the investors late to the table. Just because not every investor wants to take that risk your gains are higher because you are getting a larger slice of the pie and funding companies with first mover's advantage.
I'm wondering how many people in favor of legalization would actually like to see a pot shop in their own street. From my own experience in the Netherlands, these kinds of shops attract a sort of crowd that you would much rather avoid.
I dunno. We have a nice neighborhood pub on our street and it's great. I can stop in for a bite or a few beers and once in a while, yep...I have a few more with my neighbors/friends and we get a bit tipsy and are glad to be able to walk a block to get home instead of taking a cab.
There are also some other bars in town that "attract a sort of crowd that (I) would much rather avoid". So that's basically what I do. I don't hang out at bars that attract a bunch of tough guys looking to pick fights or pick up drunk women.
That still doesn't mean I think bars should be illegal or that people (even drunks and alcoholics) should be thrown in jail for whatever issues they have with drug (alcohol) abuse.
All other arguments about the relative benefits of alcohol or cannabis or anything else aside, that's what it comes down to for me. I just don't think the possession and consumption of anything should be enough to land you in prison. As with alcohol you must be held accountable for your actions whether sober or under the influence. And if you accidentally cause damage to person or property while under the influence, you can be held liable due to your own negligence in not managing your behavior properly.
But the idea that your diet can be considered "criminal" is frankly ridiculous to me. Either it's a relatively harmless vice where you occasionally engage in an activity with potential health risks in exchange for altering your mood/perception or you're self-medicating and habituated to something and could use help with withdrawal and with addressing the issues that led you to use intoxication as an escape or a coping mechanism.
Neither scenario is something I'd consider worth of criminal punishment. Crimes at their most basic should be situations where one person infringes the rights of another, not situations where one person makes potentially unhealthy decisions.
I believe you completely, but I bet that if their were more pot shops, that unsavory element would just frequent the shops in their own neighborhoods. The Netherlands in general seem to get all the yahoo's that would just as well stay home and smoke up if they could buy legally in their home nations.
There are a ton of shops in Boulder. They are very chill, safe, and full of normal citizens. They close before 7 so it's not like people are hanging out there later at night, bein seedy.
Peter Thiel isn't the first big investor to enter marijuana. This has been a heavily watched market ever since marijuana started becoming decriminalized/legal with a doctor's prescription.
I suspect you still need to get in "at the ground floor". Unless things have changed, cannabis businesses are still relegated to the "under the mattress" banking method, so I can't imagine there are any cannabis derivatives floating around the open market. Unless you want to invest in related industries- glassware. Frito-Lay. Pizza Hut.
The idea that you can have a nice, clean, legalized marijuana business is just as crazy as the idea that you can have a nice, clean, legalized prostitution business. It will not happen. Some stuff in life is just dark as of itself, and karma is real.
My gut reaction is to tell you that you're wrong and look for evidence of that, and blame the worst problems of cannabis supply on its current illegality. The illegatity pushes the price up; that high price and illegality attracts criminal gangs who use violence and human exploitation to supply the drug. Making it legal would reduce the cost of the drug and allow suppliers to market themselves as ethical ("free range" / "fair trade" / "organic" etc).
But looking at cigarretes in the UK we see criminal gangs are still involved in the production of dangerous[1] counterfeits and supply of those counterfeits or of smuggled cigarretes from lower tax areas.
You make it sound as if this is a bad thing. I'm having a hard time imagining what benefit will result from making a potent and fairly addictive narcotic cheaper and more available.
It's a bad thing because it leaves space for criminal gangs to make money and does nothing to tackle any harms that result from drug use.
Most people who use cannabis will experience no ill-effects. Many of the harms are reducible - use a vaporiser at the correct temperature rather than burning the plant material for example. A few people will experience ill-effects. Providing help to those people through public health measures is more effective and cheaper than targeting them through criminal justice systems.
> fairly addictive
Citation needed, unless you're misusing "addiction" to mean "habit". Cannabis is not physically addicting and the psychological addiction appears to be weak. There is some element of habit associated with it though.
I don't take drugs but I believe everything except meth should be free, totally legal, and freely available to registered addicts. All those "terrible" drugs like heroin now look like the good old days compared to meth.
People are driven to meth because they can't get high on whatever their drug of choice is because the cops and customs have cracked down so hard that drugs aren't available. The most effective way to keep people away from meth is let em get high safely and for free on whatever their poison is.
So much community money and time wasted on criminalisation, court systems, policing and incarceration of people who just want to get high. Getting high seems a silly thing to me to want to do but why do we make drug users criminals for it?
The war on drugs pours gargantuan quantities in to criminal organisations - the only solution to that is make drugs legal and free which would immediately dissolve many criminal endeavours.
The war on drugs has created the meth epidemic. Only ending the war on heroin, coke, lsd, ectasy and pot can now fight the worst of all drugs - meth.
Is your argument heroin is the lesser of two evils when compared to meth and thus should be legalized to at least get people off meth into something less evil like heroin?
Sorry for the run-on-sentence but if that's your argument it sounds absurd.
There was a documentary on Sky TV[0] of of a heroin addict who recorded his final two years of life. I urge to watch it if you haven't a clear idea of what life can be like for a drug addict. On a number of occasions one could see he sincerely hated the drug but couldn't control his addiction. He jumped out the window of his house during one attempt at going cold turkey and broke his foot since he was locked in the house and wanted to get some heroin. His veins collapsed due to all the injections of heroin over the years. He ultimately died of brain haemorrhage due to withdrawal symptoms in a detox facility.
I don't use drugs either and when I hear people's arguments about legalizing marijuana, it makes sense in the context of a society that legalized alcoholic drinks and cigarettes. But meth and heroin are in a league of their own and I don't believe your argument makes any sense whatsoever. Lowering the bar from "the worst of all drugs" to "not as bad but you'll probably get addicted to it, may lose control of your life and possibly end up with a series of medical conditions and including death" is not acceptable.
My argument is not that heroin gets people off meth, because it doesn't. My argument is that heroin junkies look for a way to get high when the cops have halted the heroin supply, so the heroin junkies take meth cause it's cheap and available and thus they become meth junkies.
In the nightclubs the partying folks want to get high but the cops have killed the ecstasy supply, so the party crowd try meth cause they want to have fun and get high, and become meth junkies.
At the universities the students want to smoke pot and listen to (what, Pink Floyd?) but having a puff is illegal, there's no pot cause it's hard to get cause it's against the law, but hey this guy has some meth, that'll get us high, and hey, meth can't really be all that bad can it?
My other argument is that drugs cost money, so how do junkies get money? They steal it, break into houses, mug people and do hold ups. Cut out the crime, just give em the drugs for free.
Drugs aren't crime, they're just sad ways for lost people to try to cope.
You've clarified your argument but doesn't sound like much of a difference.
"Legalize drugs to get people off meth"
vs
"Legalize drugs or they'll get on meth"
Kind of sounds like the same thing to me.
Meth is messed up. We seem to agree with that. My point is heroin is also very messed up. Perhaps to a lesser degree but I do know they both horrible and it makes little sense to legalize one over the other. Considering how horrific the effects of prolonged heroin use is I can't see why it should be legalized while declaring another drug off-limits.
I make no comment on marijuana since I class it differently in my head and I also make no comment on ecstasy as I virtually know nothing about its effects.
Not that I fully agree with the post you're replying to, but to be fair, I think we should note that your anecdote comes from a world where drugs are often expensive due to laws, drug users don't receive a lot of medical help in safely and non-destructively administering the drug, counseling (to solve problems without drugs) is not always easy or affordable, and drug users are shamed and criminalized.
I don't know that it would magically solve your scenario, especially as he died in a detox facility (though maybe he could have been saved if he got help earlier?) There is probably just no guaranteed safe way for some bodies/personalities to take some drugs for a prolonged period. Still, I wonder if we could uplift people on balance, if all the energy we spent on current drug policy was re-focused on helping people rather than punishing them.
I am interested in that documentary, so thanks for the pointer.
Meth is not the worst drug. In fact methamphetamine comes in legal prescription form as Desoxyn and is used daily for many with ADD and narcolepsy. I think that's a mistake to even touch that stuff but it's true. I think you could make an argument that commonly used drugs like Clonazepam (Klonopin) are far more dangerous. Unsupervised withdrawal is much more dangerous than heroin and it plays a major role in overdose deaths when mixed with opiates. The point is that all drugs to some degree are dangerous. They should all be legal and used with extreme caution if at all.
>I don't take drugs but I believe everything except meth should be free, totally legal, and freely available to registered addicts.
Registered drug addicts being supplied drugs by the government? The government would be rightly accused enslaving millions of citizens through control of the drug supply. Addicts would be at the mercy of the government, and politicians would use this dependence to force addicts to do anything they want - for which they would have the full support of the rest of society. Need to reduce the cost of road construction? Tell the "registered addicts" that if they want their next heroin dose, they better get down there and pour some concrete - and they better do it before withdrawal starts kicking in.
Decriminalization is alright with me, but what you're proposing is the reinvention of slavery. It kind of reminds me of A Scanner Darkly.
All I can tell you is that in the US, such a program would be abused to the point of absurdity. We already use the "war on drugs" to create an army of millions of unpaid workers through various prison industries programs. We lock them up, then low security inmates are used for cheap manual labor outside their prisons by local businesses (yep, these programs are in place in a number of states). Higher security inmates work in metal and other shops built on prison grounds, but their work is exported to outside businesses.
In short, our government and the corporations that control it are far more evil and greedy than anything you would find in Switzerland. A program like this on US soil would in fact be turned into modern-day slavery, and because of the stigma associated with drug addiction, these abuses would be embraced and encouraged by the US populace.
We are all dependent on the government already, but have mechanisms to prevent such abuse. Couldn't the government aready threaten to close down all hospitals? Open up all prisons? But they dont.
That's not how laws work. There needs to be a justification for something to be illegal, not for it to be legal.
In absence of any compelling argument to the contrary, things are legal by default. There has never been a terribly convincing argument for imposing punishment for marijuana.
Well, if it is Marijuana now, then what's next in line? I'm afraid to see the day when some people will start demanding the legalization of other harmful drugs, pulling "the science says" card out and rationalizing the possible usefulness of certain drugs that really should be out of everyone's hands...
Well, if it is Marijuana now, then what's next in line?
This slippery slope argument is decades old and isn't borne out by experiences with decriminalization or legalization in other countries. I'm not and never have been a user, but I see a lot more harm in criminalization than in legalization.
pulling "the science says" card out
Science is a trump card because science trumps. Seriously, people wouldn't constantly perform science if it didn't work.
Portugal did NOT legalize drugs. They changed personal use and possession of less than a 10 days personal supply so that these were no longer criminal offenses. They become administrative offenses.
Producing, distributing, and selling remain criminal offenses.
In too much of an indignant hurry in my reply. Yes, it was decriminalization not legalization. But the point stands that reducing impediments to drug use isn't going to cause civilization to crumble.
Anybody who brings up the issue of the damage done to society by drug use has to then take into account the damage done by drug prohibition. It's clear (to many) that the latter is far more harmful.
Most drugs aren't harmful anyways. Heroin is whispered as if it's terrible, when some leaders of the world were lifelong morphine addicts, with no damage in their performance. LSD is also referred to as a "hard" drug, yet has essentially zero deaths associated with it.
But that shouldn't be the argument. Bleach is very harmful, but I'm not stopped if I decide to go drink some. The constant reduction in personal liberty by deciding what chemicals people may possess.
I can only hope someday this is viewed as backwards and horrible as governing what kind of sex consenting entities engage in. (In fact, this is still a problem, as sex with consenting adults of other species is still illegal in many jurisdictions. In fact, to my shock it seems this is going in the opposite direction, as The Netherlands recently criminalized such sex. I wonder how such laws handle cases where an animal rapes a human.)
> I wonder how such laws handle cases where an animal rapes a human.
At one time, the animal might have been given a trial in a court, just like a human. Google "animals on trial" and you'll find some interesting articles about specific cases and the practice in general, mostly from a "let's make fun of our idiotic ancestors" perspective, but there is one from Slate in there that takes a more nuanced look at why they did it.
There is an early 20th century book about animal trials and punishment called "The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals" by Edmund P. Evans. It is available [1] at Project Gutenberg.
I really never enjoy this slippery slope argument, when arguably the most harmful drugs [1, 2] are already very much legal (sometimes the drug is controlled, but at least studies can be done, and those who can benefit have access).
Heroin and opiates in general simply are not very harmful, referring to the actual medication. Apart from acute respiratory depression (OD'ing), there isn't much except constipation. Overdosing is dangerous for many drugs - more people end up in the hospital from misuse of Tylenol and ibuprofen than from, say, Oxycontin.
So it's very unfair to allow only certain people access to basic medications, especially when the medicine itself isn't particularly dangerous. The study you linked has a rather expanded definition of "harm".
This has been an active area of political dispute for at least as long as I’ve been able to understand language and comprehend the news, around 20 years.
The same thing that was gained with re-legalizing alcohol, a more civil and well functioning society that values and preserves individual liberty.
Drug prohibition and the war on drugs has had an enormously deleterious effect on our society and our criminal justice system. It has resulted in one of the highest incarceration rates of any "free" country in history, for non-violent crimes where typically the "victim" in the crime is the person being jailed themselves. It has resulted in a massive change in the criminal justice system due to so many drug cases being prosecuted, and drugs being such a prominent target of police activity. The result is massive expenditures on police, DAs, and the courts and yet a constriction in the resources being used to solve and prosecute the most serious crimes (murder, rape, etc.) or to ensure justice is carried out according to the finest principles of a free and just society.
Moreover, drug prohibition results in massive amounts of money getting funneled to hardened criminals and gangs, because when the business of procuring and transporting drugs is illegal those are the people most willing and able to undertake such activity and most desirous of "easy" money outside of the conventional labor market. That vast wealth propping up criminal enterprises then serves to corrupt the criminal justice system directly, especially the police, through direct payoffs. Just as it did when alcohol was illegal.
Even when direction corruption isn't a factor, the militarization of the police has led to a massive degradation of freedom and personal safety as well as a growing divide between the law abiding public and the police.
Meanwhile, a massive section of the population, recreational drug users, becomes outlaws. They are forced into a more tentative or even adversarial relationship with the police and the justice system in general. They are more vulnerable to other crimes and less likely to cooperate with investigations. These are not just "fringe" elements of society such as destitute meth addicts on the streets, these are people who are otherwise fine, upstanding citizens. Folks such as Carl Sagan, Bryan Cranston, Morgan Freeman, and Bill Gates. These aren't people whose lives were ruined, these are people who chose to exercise their own individual liberty to explore recreational drugs, just as people choose to use alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, etc.
Overall, the war on drugs has been incredibly corrosive for liberty, the proper functioning of the criminal justice system, social cohesion, rule of law, and safety from violence. I can think of few things developments within the last century which have been more disastrous to the stability and health of America and the developed world as a whole, I think that says a lot.
Pot smokers make a big deal of legalization but seriously, have legality issues ever prevented anyone from acquiring the stuff? I think many people are focusing on legalization because they want to avoid the real question, namely what is your personal relationship with this potent narcotic. Are you in charge of it, or is it in charge of you?
Ignoring the whole "potent narcotic" thing for a second (since it's not really either), I personally don't ingest cannabis but I have in the past and frankly it's like alcohol in that you can have a little (and feel a bit relaxed) or a lot (and feel really intoxicated). Either way, I'm focused on decriminalization because the concept of throwing someone in prison for their diet is abhorrent to me.
