Legalize it + Tax it + Regulate it = Profit!

My pick last year was 2018 for a nationwide reform of marijuana  laws.   I don't smoke it, I just don't want to pay the taxes to fund a war on it.  I would rather see it sold like liquor, regulated, and taxed for revenues.  We can help end the deficit by taxing cannabis sales.

Colorado, Washington are ahead of the slow and stupid curve.

Who is the biggest loser if we do that?  Drug cartels.  Just like Capone was the biggest loser at the end of prohibition.

{Postscript:  CNN published the editorial by Roger A. Roffman the same hours that I published this.   Great minds think alike.  My role in the topic is based on my affiliation with our plant in Mexico.  As the Economist notes, America's Prohibition 2.0 on Marijuana costs lives there.}



Prohibition economics 101.  It was the same for e-waste as it is for pot. California bans export of computer monitors under SB20, and my company in Vermont made millions replacing those sales.   I was generous enough to offer the market back to California and Basel Action Network in 2010, with the California Compromise.   Oh well.

As explained by the Fox News site:

Analysts had projected the Washington voters would approve their legalization ballot, because it proposes a heavy tax for marijuana that made the proposal attractive to budget hawks. The Washington initiative calls for a 25% tax rate imposed on the product three times: when the grower sells it to the processor, when the processor sells it to the retailer, and when the retailer sells it to the customer.

I guess I'll stick with 2018 as my prediction date for the reform of cannabis laws.  When I  made that prediction, my friends looked at me ... well, probably like people looked at people who predicted votes for women, integration of schools, end of alcohol prohibition.  When it happens it happens fast.  In each of those examples, the question the history books ask is "Why did that take so long?"

The Economist had a good editorial last week, explaining the importance of marijuana reform to our USA-Mexico relations.  Fox News, Economist, WSJ ...  This is being discussed very openly everywhere now.  Pat Robertson of PTL Club has endorsed legalization.

From the Economist, it could be for law and order:

Legalisation could, in short, deal a blow to Mexico’s traffickers of a magnitude that no current policy has got close to achieving. The stoned and sober alike should bear that in mind when they cast their votes on Tuesday.

But I think state budgets will bear fruit first.   All it takes now is for FDA to stop opposing laws already passed, this can be done by executive order.  Like interracial marriage, womens vote, and gay rights, what we need now is for people to stop fearing what their children will do if they speak their minds.  This is a time for moral courage.

My parents told me they didn't smoke marijuana but that it should be legalized.  Why did it take so long?  Because the criminals make more money when it isn't taxed and they can have a monopoly.  Who opposed the export of computer monitors from California?  Shredding companies and companies that shipped anyway, like mine from other states, or from inside California (switching addresses to process Arizona and Nevada TVs and export the monitors in secret).

I hope that the president who is not looking at re-election takes opportunities like these to end stupid costly laws, a war on drugs that costs the same blood and treasure as the wars he opposed in the mid-east.

Ah, the pleasures of being a self-owned company.   We can say what we think and tell the truth, and no one will fire me in the morning.

Oh.  The Right to Repair law also passed in Massachusetts.