Pot Tax Has $1.4B Potential in California

(CBS)  There is talk in California of what you could call a radical idea for the cash-poor state to raise money. It's controversial, but proponents say the plan could smoke out more than a billion dollars for the state, as CBS News correspondent John Blackstone reports.

It is an unusual commercial: taxpayers demanding a new tax. It's an offer by marijuana users to help the state's battered budget.

"We're marijuana consumers. We want to pay our fair share."

It's estimated that $14 billion worth of marijuana is sold illegally in the state. Making it legal and taxing it at $50 dollars an ounce would bring in approximately $1.4 billion a year. Assemblyman Tom Ammiano has been pushing the idea.

"I thought it was high time - no pun intended - that this was on the table," he said.

As many see it, marijuana is already virtually legal in California where state law allows it for medical use.

At one Los Angeles dispensary, The Farmacy, the cannabis comes in buds so you can smoke it of course, but you don't have to. There's also cookies and candy bars, also drinks with cannabis as the active ingredient, and gelato - so you can take your medicine like ice cream or lollipops.

One dispensary gave out free pot to anyone with a valid prescription. The line was out the door.

While many doctors say marijuana has valid medical uses, like treating nausea in chemotherapy patients, critics say California's medical marijuana dispensaries sell the drug to almost anyone.

Predict: Marijuana Nation
Will any state legalize marijuana by the end of 2009?

"That system is a sham," said Bernard Melekian of the California Police Chiefs Association. "98 percent of the people who are acquiring marijuana at these dispensaries do not appear to have the conditions for which the law was intended to apply."

At a dispensary in L.A., users claim a wide array of ailments - chronic neck pain, an ankle injury that required 10 screws and a metal plate, and so forth.

In Oakland, a patient named Charles says marijuana is good for his mental health. "It relieves my anxiety and allows me to cope," he said.

Users in Oakland now pay a special city tax on medical marijuana - a first in the state, but maybe not the last. Marijuana tax promoters say a lot of potential revenue is just going up in smoke.

[collegedb8ter]

Gate-way Drug- here is the issue at hand as i see it; claiming that marijuanna has negative side effects is tan amount to an ad hoc argument; there is no good independent (and i mean scietifically, not by an "indepent" group) study to verify these assertions. almost all bodily damage is minimal and only temporary, and on par with normal daily activities that aren't illegal. as far as damage to your life this is where the ad hoc comes in, and it really is a matter of alternate causality, and more importantly of transperancy. i say tranparency because this debate is about how much you see, and the truth is that the only people that become statistics are the people who do something wrong and get caught. you only see the bad. such as when they call it a gateway drug, but that is because they only catch the people who take it to coke and heroin, but never the weekend warriors who are content with marijuana. You think it tears families apart, but what about all the ones who never seek help, because the family is fine with it. all the things you see on the tv commercials, first never happen, but are still just extreme examples. i went to a very good college, with very smart people, i knew hardly anyone who had never smoked marijuana (not because i hung out with stoners, i knew completely randomized people in classes), and in my hall, there was only about 4 people who didn't smoke marijuana at least once a week. I personally consume marijuana for chronic shoulder pain and I maintain a 3.8 GPA in College, I am on the debate team as well and in High School was one of the top 150 debaters in the country. What you have to realize when you look to the people who ruined thier lives and others is that there is no control study in that group, but when you have people who smoke weed and don't ruin thier lives you can't say "it ruins lives". those people were going to find a way to ruin thier lives.

[collegedb8ter]

1) I would like to point out that speeding is the #1 contributing factor in all motor vehicle accidents.

2) Family Toll- Scapegoating... what about the million other destructive behaviors that people subject themselves to as a result of their circumstances? Some people deal with stress by eating alot, eating nothing, crawling inside of a bottle, self mutilation, abusing themselves or others. The individual's problems are not caused by marijuana, it is only a crutch, should we ban razor blades, alcohol, and all-you-can-eat buffets, just because people can use them to hurt themselves? No because a majority of the population are responsible.

3)Traffic Fatalities and work production- Any study done that supports a ban on marijuana that claims to be scientific is flawed. Pharmacologists cannot get a handle on it with their methods, and because they cannot see the reality of the non-material state of consciousness that users experience, they are forced to design experimental situations very far removed from the real world in order to get measurable effects. There are three conditions under which marijuana can be shown to impair general psychological performance in laboratory subjects. They are:
by giving it to people who have never had it before;
by giving people very high doses that they are not used to
(or giving it orally to people used to smoking it); and
by giving people very hard things to do, especially things that they have never had a chance to practice while under the influence of the drug.

Under any of these three conditions, pharmacologists can demonstrate that marijuana impairs performance. And if we look at the work being done by NIMH-funded researchers, all of it fulfills one or more of these conditions. In addition, the tests being used by these scientists are designed to look for impairments of functions that have nothing to do with why marijuana users put themselves in an altered state of consciousness. People who get high on marijuana do not spontaneously try to do arithmetic problems or test their fine coordination.

What pharmacologists cannot make sense of is that people who are high on marijuana cannot be shown, in objective terms, to be different from people who are not high. That is, if a marijuana user is allowed to smoke his usual doses and then to do things he has had a chance to practice while high, he does not appear to perform any differently from someone who is not high. Now, this pattern of users performing better than nonusers is a general phenomenon associated with all psychoactive drugs. For example, an alcoholic will vastly outperform a nondrinker on any test if the two are equally intoxicated; he has learned to compensate for the effects of the drug on his nervous system. But compensation can proceed only so far until it runs up against a ceiling imposed by the pharmacological action of the drug on lower brain centers. Again, since marijuana has no clinically significant action on lower brain centers, compensation can reach 100 percent with practice.

These considerations mean that there are no answers to questions like, What does marijuana do to driving ability? The only possible answer is, It depends. It depends on the person - whether he is a marijuana user, whether he has practiced driving while under the influence of marijuana. In speaking to legislative and medical groups, I have stated a personal reaction to this question in the form of the decision I would make if I were given the choice of riding with one of the following four drivers:
a person who had never smoked marijuana before and just had;
a marijuana smoker who had never driven while high and was just about to;
a high marijuana smoker who had practiced driving while high; and
a person with any amount of alcohol in him.

I would unhesitatingly take driver number three as the best possible risk. One may wonder how many drivers of types one and two are on our highways. Probably many. But there is some consolation in the fact that persons learning to do things under the influence of marijuana almost always are anxious about their performance and therefore tend to err on the side of overcaution.

[sero5]

Our national forests here in California are being razed by Mexican drug cartel thugs to grow marijuana, or I should say "medical" marijuana. How many bogus prescriptions for "medical" marijuana. In five years, another group of crackpot California doctors will claim that meth and cocaine can be safely snorted for medical ailments. Then, another voter proposition to legalize them. ..And talk about taxing meth and cocaine.

[CaliforniaCannabisIncCEO]

As a Cannabis ("Marijuana" as you people know it) professional I can tell you that this is a wolf in sheeps clothes. Cannabis is already subject to taxation if sold per existing California law. I have a state sellers permit, and an IRS EIN, plenty of taxes are already paid. What the intiative authored by Richard Lee, and AB 390 offer is just new ways for cannabis users (for whatever reason) to be prosecuted still. As it stands the penalty for possesion of an ounce or less of Cannabis in California if you are not a medical patient is a $100 fine. Thats less than most speeding tickets, the fine for driving while talking on your cellphone is higher.

This is being pushed by special interests who want to be able to setup and control a monopoly. Welcome the the United States of Corporate America.

CBS why don't you cover the REAL STORY
Production, Analysis, & Distribution of Cannabis & Marijuana Cigarettes
Solicitation Number: N01DA-10-7773
Agency: Department of Health and Human Services
Office: National Institutes of Health
Location: National Institute on Drug Abuse
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=2f734e46a74d477e37ac07798c08a3ae&tab=core&tabmode=list&cck=1&au=&ck=

[AB390]

Tell your legislators in Sacramento to legalize marijuana. Visit <a href="http://yes390.org"> <b> yes390.org </b> </a>

[hionareef]

Keep it illegal, just decriminalize it.

Procuring and enjoying pot has forced me look at the flip side to a lot standard viewpoints. I don't think most people will be able to handle that. I would really hate to see my sacrament used and abused by Joe Sixpack and Suzy Soccormom.

[landy1986]

rennin1 is an idiot saying 98% of people are going to go to crack or any other thing from smoking pot. why not make alchohal elegal people die from it all the time how many people die from pot?0 .legalizing pot is very smart for helping the economy and makeing more money. i dont get these idiots like rennin

[presjfk]

$1.4 bill is a drop in the bucket -or bong if you prefer for California. The only solution for our governments, Federal, State and local is to cut spending and not be allowed to deficit spend. Its a lesson many individuals and families are learning across the country. It should start with our government.,

[kangaroolipstick]

True that. Legalizing and taxing the sale of Marijuana would only bring more revenue for the state to be spent poorly. The government would probably use this extra money to give themselves a raise for coming up with this idea of taxing marijuana.

[kangaroolipstick]

Oh and I forgot. You can brew your own beer at home just in case you didn't know. You can save in all those taxes. Good luck having it come out not tasting like Carbonated Soy Sauce. If you are against legalizing MJ, keep going to church and praying about it and that your kids are perfect and they don't smoke or try Marijuana. Maybe you can pay the church more money to have a prayer chain started on the subject since we are going to hell with a joint in our pocket. Maybe you should tell your kids that you got to drunk and forgot to strap a rubber on your dads wang and that is why you are here today. Maybe if you lit up that joint instead you would of been laughing to hard and been content sitting on the couch watching the Discovery channel's episode of Meerkat Manor to make that bad decision that the dude sitting next to you poring you another shot of Vodka love's you and you should sleep with him, them squirt out this kid that you didn't even want let alone afford to have in the first place, then they grow up to be $hit bag's with no personal guidance from a parent because they are out getting loaded at the bar not paying any attention to them and letting school and proper guidance go out the window. Bad parenting is a gateway drug.

[rennin1]

To thejaypee:
You seem to suggest that if marijuana is to remain illegal, then tobacco and alcohol should be made illegal as well. But voters in every state in the US have uniformly decided that tobacco and alcohol should be legal and that marijuana should not. Perhaps your argument for legalizing pot is with the entire US, not just me. Let me know how that works out for you. Also, where did you get the idea that people are not free in this country? I believe the US is the freest country on the planet and that you are trying to make a bogus case that people here are not free. Well, JP, if you don't like living here in the US, then you can always try to find some other country to live in that is freer to live in than this country is. As for waiting for my generation to die off, where did you get the idea that I am any older than you are?

[kangaroolipstick]

As much as I dream this happening, I believe it will still be awhile tell we see MJ legalized. The pharma companies will fight this tell the bitter end. The sale of legal drugs: Xanex, Vicodin, Zoloft and all that crap that will kill us humans will decline. As for people who say, "If it is legal you can just grow it so how would the state make money?" I have my medical card, I can grow 12 plants, but I only choose to grow one or two for personal, and not all the time because it is a pain in the A$$. You have to make sure the lights are on timers, don't run out of water, pump doesn't brake, over fertilizing and frying your plants to death(done this one), under watering, etc. People don't have the time for this $hit!!! To think that people will just grow and not buy it anymore is the dumbest come back against it. You can grow your own corn A$$hole.. I don't see you doing that!! Or you can raise an F'ing cow in your backyard also and kill it when you are hungry. People pay for things that make life simpler. Buying the GOD given weed at the local store will be a hit!!! Pack of Marlboro Marijuana Lights Please!!!!!!!!!!