Colorado is making BIG money from tax revenues from the sale of legal marijuana. Colorado may pull in $155 million this year, which is more than anyone expected. This news is making other states look at Colorado with envy. State legislatures all over the country are struggling to balance their budgets, so this source of easy money is causing state legislators and governors to reevaluate their views on drugs.
It’s a big topic, here in New Jersey. Philip Morris is not actually considering releasing a pot cigarette, despite the buzz on the Internet; it was a hoax. But this hoax had legs, because most people believe that legal pot is on the horizon.
I’m not a huge fan of the legalization of pot. I’m quite happy with my legal vices and don’t need more options. My friends, who like to wake and bake, seem to have no trouble finding product, but the people who really shouldn’t have access to the drug (ie my kid) have sufficient road blocks. I find it odd that we’re de-stimatizing pot, while tobacco is vilified.
I hate to be the uncool blogger, but the idea of a bunch of semi-employed 20-somethings sitting around a rental apartment getting baked all day is kind of depressing.
Same-sex marriage policies have somehow become joined with pot legalization policies. Pot is the new gay marriage. Maybe Andrew Sullivan is to blame for that coupling. But they are substantially different. We have no idea of what the social implications of the legalization of recreational pot use. Colorado may see a short-term rise in revenues in taxes, but then may have to shell out double the money for rehab centers five years down the line. We really don’t know what will happen.
So, I think we should keep legal pot in Colorado for ten years, not let it expand past its borders, and monitor the impact. Does legal pot increase consumption? Does it create a class of baked dudes with dreadlocks and skateboards? Does pot become a gateway drug for harder drugs? Does it increase the need for state-run rehab centers? Does it increase the number of people who drive, while high? Or does it have a minimal negative impact?
Apt. 11d 
I don’t think the big deal is the $155 million in excise taxes. I think the big deal is the costs (direct and indirect) of the involvement of the criminal justice system with marijuana prohibition.
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And the social cost of criminal enterprises. Here in BC we have a huge illegal pot industry that is run by the same organizations who sell much more serious drugs. So pot isn’t necessarily a gateway drug for the average user but rather a huge fundraiser for the sellers who also sell other drugs. It’s a financial gateway drug product for the vendors.
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There seems to be a lot of pot tourism, so I wouldn’t count on this scaling up.
Also, it’s a plant. If you want some of your own, you can grow it. There’s potential for a pot bubble and the collapse of the tax base. (Does anybody remember the llama bubble of the ’80s? People speculated in llamas, because they were initially very expensive, but then the llamas had babies and suddenly llamas were EVERYWHERE and they weren’t worth anything.)
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To be fair, if you light the llama on fire, all it does it spit on you.
I don’t think it will scale up completely either, but I think the tax potential is fairly large. It’s really easy to make beer, but almost no one does it for themselves and those that do are only rarely doing it to save money. Economies of scale and the needed skill are going to make purchasing a better option for most if it is legal to purchase.
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You’re not hanging out in the right circles. Among my friends, everyone and their mother is now making home brew.
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Um, below was me.
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I mean, above.
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but the people who really shouldn’t have access to the drug (ie my kid) have sufficient road blocks
I’m sure your kids’ can access pot fairly easily as it is. I’m for legalization: 20-something wastoids are going to get baked no matter what so it doesn’t make sense to include them as a serious factor in the decision about whether to legalize. The question is, how many people will legalization draw in that would otherwise never tried or formed a habit? I wouldn’t start smoking if it was legalized in my state and I imagine that would be true for most people who currently don’t smoke. If it’s legal in my state by the time my children are teenagers I’ll take the same approach as I would alcohol: it can be fun and enjoyable but you need to exercise some caution and not let it take over your life.
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“The question is, how many people will legalization draw in that would otherwise never tried or formed a habit?”
This is a question people study and on which the information is really hard to parse out, but I think we are now doing an experiment and we’ll see what happens. I’m pretty sure, personally, that it’s a non-zero number, but I think the science behind it is complex. There are anecdotal news reports coming out of Colorado that use is up among HS students, but I will be watching for more than anecdote.
I voted against the legalization of marijuana. Although I’m sympathetic to the arguments that marijuana spawns enforcement costs (and not worthwhile ones) in its illegal form, I am unconvinced that the increase in marijuana use that would come with legalization won’t spawn issues of its own (alcohol and tobacco impose huge costs on society, and, alcohol, in particular, is a drug we have a huge history with; that history doesn’t stop it from becoming a significant drug of abuse).
There’s a letter circulating (and, I haven’t looked it up to see if it’s a scam) on a 20’something who overdosed on a marijuana candy bar that had been left in a refrigerator. The candy bar looks like candy. We are now the other state that has legalized marijuana, and I can see that use in public spaces is going to be an issue for me (say, at or after sports games). I’m also concerned about vaping (e-cigarettes).
I am totally uncool and embrace that uncoolness, and marijuana is a particular problem, because like tobacco, it smells, invades my space, and makes me cough (all of which makes it worse than alcohol, which, at least if it isn’t spilled doesn’t cause any of those problems) so marijuana use in public spaces is especially disturbing to me.
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There’s a letter circulating (and, I haven’t looked it up to see if it’s a scam) on a 20′something who overdosed on a marijuana candy bar that had been left in a refrigerator.
A marijuana overdose is, theoretically, possible, but in practice almost impossible. You get sleepy way, way before you get enough to do you serious harm. Even if this “candy bar” was super concentrated, you’d need a lot of them. I am almost certain this is made up.
I am unconvinced that the increase in marijuana use that would come with legalization won’t spawn issues of its own (alcohol and tobacco impose huge costs on society, and, alcohol, in particular, is a drug we have a huge history with
We should expect that use will go up with legalization. But, we can be close to 100% certain that the wider social effects of marijuana use are much, much lower than those of alcohol. What we might even hope for is a substitution effect, w/ some people switching to marijuana from drinking. (We have lots of experience here, really.) There are real concerns, but I don’t think any of these ones, or in Laura’s post, are very serious concerns.
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We also decided, as a nation, that the costs of illegal alcohol were even more significant than the costs of legal alcohol. Illegal alcohol was less penalized than marijuana, and the costs of alcohol as a drug are greater. As such, I really don’t find this a convincing reason to keep marijuana illegal.
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“but the people who really shouldn’t have access to the drug (ie my kid) have sufficient road blocks. ”
This is backwards. The liquor store and 7-11 actually check ids and tend not to sell to the underage. Your local pot dealer does not. It is illegal regardless of age so why bother. Besides, it isn’t hard to find drugs – junkies can do it.
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I agree with others than not wanting your teenager to smoke pot is not a good reason for keeping pot illegal. First, if your kid wants pot he can get pot, and there’s little you can do to stop him. If legal pot for those over 18 kills the black market, that would probably make pot harder to get than it is now, though honestly, if a teenager wants pot badly, they’ll probably find a way regardless of illegality. Secondly, there are huge social costs, particularly to the African American community. Not wanting your kid to dabble in pot doesn’t seem like a good reason to support the continued ruination and criminalization of young African American men. A felony conviction based on marijuana possession ruins lives and contributes to higher crime when a felon is shut out from all gainful employment for the rest of their lives. Judicial discretion is highly racially biased.*
*There are statistics that actually show this, but I will present an anecdote here. A former intern of my mother’s, who was, at the time, a young white female college student. Police raided her house and found a large quantity of pot and $40,000 in cash. She and her roommates were arrested for dealing pot. At the time, I was a pre-teen, and my mother framed this as “let this be a lesson to you, this woman’s life is ruined and she will go to prison and never be a lawyer.” Fast forward 10 years, and I reconnect with this woman through friends of friends. She’s a law student at Penn, married, and having a baby. Last I heard she graduated and is now a lawyer. I have no idea what happened, but clearly being a somewhat major dealer didn’t really derail her life in the long term.
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I forgot to add, I really doubt this would have been the case had she not been a middle class white woman in a fairly liberal city.
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“If legal pot for those over 18 kills the black market, that would probably make pot harder to get than it is now, ”
I think that is not going to be true, and that we are going to get the test of the hypothesis. My prediction? Marijuana use will go up among everyone. I don’t know how much of the effect will be substitution (and, I do agree that there will be some substitution alcohol, though I’m not clear — is there some reason why people wouldn’t both smoke and drink at the same time?). I also think there will be greater underage use. But, I think those are empirical questions to study and I could be wrong. If drug legalization did not increase drug use and did not increase drug use among children, I really would have to reconsider my opposition, and, even if legalization did increase those social ills, but decreased other social ills, I’d balance those as well. On the other hand, if we had reasonable data on those questions, I don’t have an issue with regulating use through some commitment to individual freedom. I’m cool with regulating drugs, even when they limit freedom.
By overdose, I didn’t mean death, which indeed is pretty unlikely, and there has been a hoax circulating on deaths from marijuana use. The article I was thinking of was a young man who ended up in a psych ward because of inadvertent consumption of a marijuana candy bar: http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/10/that-six-serving-bar-of-marijuana-chocolate-my-son-ate-it/ and, I think, is a real story. I’ve talked to my kids about this story out of concern about candy bars.
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I’ve always found the concerns about vaping hard to understand. I guess the idea is that kids who would otherwise never try tobacco will try an e-cigarette get hooked. I guess it seems slightly more plausible than the fear that kids will put nicotine patches on themselves, but it still seems bizarre.
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Unless I got the data wrong:
150 million in pot tax revenue /
30 billion in total CO state revenues =
.3%
So, eh. Seems to me the “increased revenues” storyline is, as usual, just typical media bullshit (no stories I saw gave the % of total) to sell eyeballs and make us think “something’s happening” when it’s not.
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I think people (and by that, I think I might mean libertarians, or those of us who have libertarian tendencies in some instances) underestimate the effect of increased access + some section of the human population that has addictive tendencies and will, with access, try something that they wouldn’t try and end up addicted or otherwise impaired by the addiction.
Laura writes “Pot is the new gay marriage” and, I think, for some of these discussions, there are parallels. Normalizing gay marriage might increase the probability that people will be in a gay relationship (note, I’m not saying it will increase the probability that someone is gay, but it might change behavior). The difference is that gay marriage isn’t bad for your health, while addictions to psychoactive drugs are (and, I am talking about addiction, not use).
Pretty much everyone recognizes that alcohol and nicotine are addictive (in the technical definition of addiction). People sometimes argue about marijuana, that it is not physiologically addictive, but it does cause addictive behavior (and most people use the second definition these days).
http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/marijuana-abuse/marijuana-addictive
So, ultimately, for me, the question is whether the costs of the addiction and abuse of a drug outweigh the costs of the drug being illegal. And I consider that question one of public policy, science and pubic health, not of ideology.
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Do you really think that people don’t have access now? Drinking definitely went up after the end of prohibition and I expect some people will try pot. However, the social ills didn’t necessarily increase after the end of prohibition and I don’t expect social ills to increase for pot. And I definitely see huge gains in not locking up so many people, especially young, male, minorities. The costs are not shared equally. It is wrong what we’ve done with our public policy, we have destroyed generations, and we can’t even keep drugs out of prisons. If that means I am acting from ideological reasons, I’m happy to own it.
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The fear about vaping is that people think we’ve been fairly successful in the marketing campaign against smoking (i.e. it destroys your lungs, makes you smell bad, and it’s icky). Vaping avoids some of those issues (i.e doesn’t make you smell bad) while still keeping the cancer risk. Also, there seem to be a series of vaping products that (like marijuana candy bars) increase delivery methods and taste, increasing the probability that someone might find one of the products “tasty” (like wine coolers or beer or other varieties of alcohol). Again, it’s an emprical question — does vaping increase the probability of nicotine use?
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I don’t think I’ve seen anything plausible that indicates vaping has a cancer risk remotely the same as smoking. If bad smell was all people worried about, snuff or snus would be the thing people go to.
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The blog by Mark Kleiman & Co (www.samefacts.com) has been very helpful to me on this issue. Kleiman actually helped Washington design some of its policy reactions once the referendum passed. He and the other frontpagers there really know their stuff.
In laying the groundwork for the successful referenda in Washington and Colorado, the argument that most swayed voters was, “Marijuana is not more harmful than alcohol.” Once a majority of voters agreed with that proposition, resistance to legalization fell really fast (though I can’t find the cite I was thinking of).
Here’s a good one on the topic more generally http://www.samefacts.com/2013/10/drug-policy/public-opinion-on-cannabis-is-it-game-over/
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“Marijuana is not more harmful than alcohol” is, in my opinion, a really bad reason for legalizing marijuana. And, I actually think it’s probably not quite as harmful.
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That number is only an estimate – it remains to be seen how much actually gets collected.
MJ is currently a gateway drug only because the guys who sell it would prefer that you move on to the harder stuff, with bigger profits for them. Making it legal means the guys who sell it want to keep you on it, rather than move on to illegal and really harmful recreational drugs. I have a faint hope too, that this may be the start of the end of the War on Drugs, so we can replace that with a rational drug policy.
The other reason to vote for legalization: I have to pay taxes on my drug of choice (wine), don’t see any good reason why the other dope fiends shouldn’t pay for theirs.
CO doesn’t allow any public use of MJ, so a step ahead of tobacco pollution in that case. I am troubled by dopers in apartments stinking up the whole block with their private puffing.
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“CO doesn’t allow any public use of MJ, so a step ahead of tobacco pollution in that case.”
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s true here, too, but it didn’t prevent the crowd around the last football game being completely immersed in smoke. Of course, they were going to the superbowl, but it remains to be seen whether the public use provisions are going to get enforced.
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