Pubdate: Tue, 21 Jul 2009
Source: Daily Press (Victorville, CA)
Copyright: 2009 Freedom Communications, Inc.
Contact: http://www.vvdailypress.com/sections/contactus/
Website: http://www.vvdailypress.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1061
Author: Steve Williams, Opinion Page Editor
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?115 (Cannabis - California)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?161 (Cannabis - Regulation)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)

IS THE END OF THE 'DRUG WAR' IN SIGHT?

The debate about whether to legalize marijuana is just about over. We 
give it no more than a year, and perhaps less if the economy 
continues to resist the financial ministrations of the Obama 
administration, before the evil weed becomes just another legal 
source of tax revenue.

Last week, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn proposed a 
measure to tax medical marijuana dispensaries, and today, Oakland 
will count mail-in ballots on a proposal to levy a business tax on 
dispensaries in that city. Odds are pretty good the proposal will be 
approved if California polls are accurate. Last April, the Field Poll 
found that 56 percent of the state's voters want to legalize and tax 
marijuana. And the same poll showed Los Angeles County voters are 60 
percent pro-pot.

And how much tax revenue would that yield for California? The state's 
Board of Equalization (the people responsible for administering the 
state's tax system) calculated that a $50 per ounce levy and sales 
tax on all marijuana purchases would yield $1.4 billion a year.

Of all humans, politicians have the keenest sense of smell for tax 
revenue sources, and the odor emanating from marijuana is powerful 
indeed. Almost an aphrodisiac, in fact.

If marijuana is thus legalized via the tax argument, it would thus 
join cigarettes, alcohol, gambling and various and sundry other sops 
to human frailty once viewed with alarm and disdain by society at 
large as just another way to fatten government's take. And, of 
course, to bring the marijuana market under government control.

Such control would be very bad news for participants in the illegal 
drug trade, here and abroad (think Mexico). That trade yields in 
excess of a trillion dollars a year, just in the United States, and 
supports a criminal empire responsible for the violent deaths of 
thousands of people every year. Just in the United States.

Legalization, in other words, would result not only in a shot in the 
arm (no pun intended) for tax collections, it would spell the 
beginning of the end of the "drug war," a war that has cost so much 
money and so many lives and has gone on so long it makes such 
military operations as Korea, Vietnam and Iraq pale by comparison. If 
that war's goal was to eradicate marijuana use, it has proved 
unwinnable. And social liberals have long argued that government 
control via legalization and taxation are the only effective weapons available.

Looks like we're soon going to find out if they're right.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom