Back during the depths of this economic mess, I wrote a piece here advocating legalizing and taxing marijuana as an answer to California’s unbalanced budget nightmare. Since then, my arguments have appeared too many places to count and much has occurred to what they used to call ‘Sin Taxes,’ as a route to getting our states back in the black.
If marijuana were simply legalized in California, and taxed at $50 per ounce, let’s say 10% of retail price (give or take), it would add $1 Billion per year to California’s budget – I didn’t make that up; that’s what a recent study has concluded. We don’t have the luxury of ignoring this any more.
The time and scarce resources of our court system, law enforcement, and prison system are all hugely consumed and negatively affected by keeping marijuana technically illegal in California. I say ‘technically illegal,’ because the medical marijuana legislative scheme has worked well in this state since it was enacted in the mid-90’s and it has spawned some 12 or 13 other states’ schemes, all working fairly well in these days when nothing associated with government (or finance) seems to work well, or at all for that matter.
Yes, we have a lot of medical marijuana dispensaries that have opened in Los Angeles – you can throw a rock from my office building and hit several at this point, but all seem well run, law-abiding, and, they are there, day after day, despite certain newly elected officials who would like to make a name for themselves by being anti-crusaders, against something. We need to get used to the fact that California’s statutory scheme for medical marijuana has been reviewed and largely approved by the highest appellate courts in this state, as well as the California Supreme Court, and the 9th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals, hearing California-originated legal cases.
The medical research at this point is clear – marijuana has real, live medicinal properties, despite contrary US Supreme Court holdings and certain federal agencies’ insane refusal to take marijuana off the list of drugs that have no medicinal properties (think, Heroin, or Crack), to the contrary. When one considers the proliferation of liquor stores in Los Angeles, especially in lower income/ socio-economic areas, and that liquor is absolutely legal yet still causes 50,000+ auto deaths per year, countless domestic and other violence, and destroys livers (causing cirrhosis), causes lung cancer, heart disease, and many other respiratory and circulatory problems, and that we the taxpayers bear all the cost of all the medical problems unquestionably laid at liquor’s feet, it is just crazy to continue to single out marijuana for antiquated special treatment when our state is absolutely broke.
Marijuana is California’s largest cash crop – pick a number: $13 Billion. It is not a ‘gateway drug,’ such that its use will lead to a new crop of heroin addicts, and, this is the really important part – it is not going away. Just like marijuana has been found in 4000-year old Chinese tombs, and in prehistoric archaeological settings wherever it can be grown, just like marijuana was the single most prescribed over the counter drug at American pharmacies in the latter 19th Century, just like Queen Victoria used it for her menstrual cramps, just like our nation’s Founding Fathers grew hemp as a major crop from which they made all their clothing, paper products and so much more, marijuana is a hardy weekd and has managed to survive whatever 20th Century society has thrown at it – and, it will continue to survive, whether we grow up and face facts or not.
Einstein famously said that insanity is doing the exact same thing over and over again, expecting a different result this time. It is a metaphor for US attempts to make marijuana illegal for much of the 20th Century – before that, you would have been laughed out of the room if you got all upset about the ‘Evil Weed with the Roots in Hell’ (actual name of a 1930’s anti-marijuana propaganda movie that college kids still watch and laugh uproariously over). Marijuana grew wild all across the Midwest and does so even today; during WWII, it was widely grown for hemp for the war effort. There are actually receptors in the human brain that are tuned and keyed for THC, one of the 50+ active chemical compounds in marijuana, meaning that somewhere back in the mists of human evolution, this herb, which grows wild worldwide, played a bigger role in human consciousness and cognitive development than most people would be comfortable admitting.
But, you don’t have to agree with me about the absurdity of making war on a weed and throwing Billions, and I mean Billions (some estimates exceed $100 Billion), since the Nixon-era began Herculean efforts to stamp out marijuana and the US Government Study that said marijuana was no big thing and that we ought to lighten up on our laws. Nixon is said to have thrown the report into the wastebasket and refused to read it. Just look at as a matter of pure economics – $1 Billion per year in tax revenue just from marijuana legalization, year in and year out, will help do miracles for California at its time of economic need and we can no longer play pretend, ‘wishing and hoping’ games with this issue. I won’t even mention the racist circus that Congress engaged in back in the 1930’s to make marijuana illegal in the first place or the Hearst Empire’s spirited lobbying for its own paper production that fueled the anti-hemp hysteria – you can enjoy researching that on your own. It is some 80-something years later, we live now in the 21st Century, medical breakthroughs have proven the medicinal uses of marijuana better than I can here – let’s end the nonsense, legalize this weed already, and do something intelligent to help California’s economy.
When I wrote my first FHD article on this topic, I ended by putting on my flak jacket to await the comments – the comments were more supportive than I had imagined they would be; I have again put on my flak jacket…