This week, legislators here will consider excise and sales taxes on marijuana of up to 30 percent combined. The proposal emerged from a task force of health officials, representatives of the state’s rapidly developing marijuana industry and others that was commissioned last year to help develop rules for marijuana.
The goal, task force members and lawmakers say, is to set taxes high enough to finance the administration of new laws, but not so high that customers are driven back to the black market.
“We should see a financial benefit as a state that can help pay for enforcement and other fundamental issues,” said Christian Sederberg, a Denver lawyer on the panel whose firm helped draft Amendment 64, the measure legalizing recreational marijuana. “The other side is that if you tax something too high, then you simply crowd out the regulated market. We’re confident we’ll find the right balance.”
Wow. A glimmer of sanity on the marijuana issue. I don’t like it any more than I do smoking tobacco or drinking hard liquor. But it is certainly less dangerous than the former and the negative societal effects are much lower than both smoking and drinking.
Maybe people are starting to remember a little history.
Prohibition: Been there tried that, didn’t work then and it’s not working now.