Checking Rough and Tumble in the early afternoon yesterday to catch up on the latest California news, the first two headlines made me think I had fallen through a time warp. The first said Tom Campbell was running for the U.S. Senate. The second said the Schwarzenegger Budget was overly optimistic. I’ve read those stories before. Must have come from the archives.
Then I came upon the third story: Assembly committee okays recreational marijuana use and proposes to tax it.
Now, here is something new. I figured that the legislature was going to try a new way to solve the budget problem. By a 4 to 3 vote the Assembly Public Safety Committee moved forward AB 390 by Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco).
The bill has a long way to go – in fact if it does not get to the Assembly floor by Friday it will have to start over again. But could this proposal have a chance for success because of timing? Let’s face it — the state budget is a mess. The Legislative Analyst was reporting the proverbial snowball in Hell had a better chance than the state has in getting the money the governor wants from the Feds, and the marijuana bill promises to raise substantial revenue from people who would be quite willing to pay. Both the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle articles reported that an ounce of marijuana would be subject to a $50 tax.
Except in reading the measure I discovered the levy was not a tax, it was a fee. Continuing the effort to get around the two-thirds vote for taxes, this bill labeled the charge a fee and segregated the revenue within the General Fund.
The Drug Abuse Prevention Supplemental Funding Account would be established to receive the funds and they could only be “expended exclusively for drug education, awareness, and rehabilitation programs under the jurisdiction of the Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs.”
In other words the revenue collected by the state on the sale of marijuana would not be used to help with the budget deficit. Basically, this is what the Assembly Committee passed: A bill to legalize a drug and set money aside from the drug’s sale for drug education programs! One suspects the education programs will not be how to stop that drug’s use.
Voters approved a medical marijuana measure in 1996 to allow the use of marijuana for people who were suffering from illness. I expected the same message would be tried to seek support for an effort to legalize and tax marijuana and appeal to voters to aid the suffering state of California.
But, this bill will go nowhere. It will fall into the jaws of the tax versus fee debate; it will be chewed up by the more-mandates-on-the-General-Fund debate. And, that’s even before the opponents of legalizing marijuana blast it.
Like many an issue, this one looks like it will bypass the legislature and be settled one way or another by the voters with the initiative process. I’ve read that story before. Must come from the archives.