LEGALIZE MARIJUANA -- AND TAX IT, TOO

IS IT TIME -- yet -- to tax marijuana?

California dodged a budget bullet, and now Massachusetts, New York and
other states are under the same gun. As governors and state
legislatures scrape for new sources of revenue, has the time come to
talk seriously -- really seriously, without winks, puns and smirks --
about regulating and taxing marijuana?

It's hard to avoid the brutal truths, and even harder to admit them.
The marijuana market is immense, barely restrained by prohibition
laws, while the harm it causes society is minuscule compared with
alcohol and tobacco.

If there is anyone, anywhere, who believes that investing more
taxpayer dollars in prohibition enforcement will extirpate marijuana
from within our national borders, let him or her step forward and
answer a few plain questions:

. How many more millions of people will have to be arrested,
prosecuted, convicted and punished to achieve success in the struggle
against marijuana?

. When "success" is achieved, how many more people will be in jails
and prisons?

. How much will that cost taxpayers and where will the money come
from?

This is the time for defenders of prohibition to answer those
questions, or otherwise explain specifically how the war against
marijuana can be won. If they can't, let them forever hold their
peace, letting the debate turn productively to the
alternatives.

Some see decriminalization as an alternative, like the reform enacted
by Massachusetts voters in a landslide last November, where personal
use is only a civil infraction but commerce remains criminal. Thus
were the alcohol laws, 1920-33, during the era we call Prohibition.
Decriminalization protects consumers from arrest and the permanent
stain of a criminal record, but keeps a heavy burden on police and the
courts to stamp out "trafficking."

(New York solved that problem in 1923 by repealing its
alcohol-prohibition laws, ceding the burden of enforcement to federal
authorities. It also avoided the level of prohibition-related crime
and violence experienced in other cities, such as Chicago and Detroit.)

Some will suggest the tomato model, where cannabis is treated like any
other agricultural commodity, with controls over purity and packaging,
and subject to ordinary sales and income taxes. California is said to
collect $100 million annually from sales taxes on medical marijuana
alone.

The fiscal circumstances of states, however, demands that this
commodity be exploited for every dime of revenue that can be squeezed
out of it. Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 admonition -- that "we threw on
the table as spoils to be gambled for by the enemies of society the
revenue that our government had theretofore received, and the
underworld acquired unparalleled resources thereby" -- can be said
about drug dealers today. As it was then, the solution is a system of
regulation and taxation.

When the question turns from whether to regulate and tax cannabis to
how, it's not hard to come up with a legal plan. Legislatures are
staffed with legions of lawyers adept at concocting regulatory
schemes. The real barrier to reform is the taboo against discussing
the subject, as for too long drug policy has been the "third rail" of
politics: Touch it and you're dead.

When the taboo yields, blustering politicians can turn to
policymaking: How deeply should government be involved in the legal
cannabis market? (A monopoly, like state lotteries, or by regulatory
oversight, as with casinos?) How can the level of tax be set to
produce the most revenue, without encouraging a black market? What
about home cultivation? In what form should legal cannabis be sold? By
whom? How does a regulatory system best impose upon cannabis consumers
a profound sense of responsibility for the consequences for their conduct?

Although there is no legal impediment to states' passing regulation
and taxation laws, they could not go into actual effect until federal
law is modified. In the meantime, states might follow New York's 1923
lead, shifting the cost of enforcement to federal authorities. That
would surely get the attention of Congress.