Living in WA, I have seen more of what legalized marijuana can do to people’s lives. I have seen it destroy marriages, send a college student to jail for hitting a guy on a bicycle and killing him, while high, totally ruining the kid’s life. They did let him graduate before beginning his sentence. The guy that he killed went unidentified for months because no one missed him. He was riding a bike home in the dark with no lights because he had lost his drivers’ license for a DUI. The woman who sold him the “medical” marijuana is now divorced and cut off from her family because they want nothing to do with her.
I used to go around and around with the marijuana advocates on this forum. My wife and I live in Washington as well. Politicians and law enforcement had a very permissive attitude towards marijuana even before legalization, but consumption skyrocketed resulting in all sorts of social problems. My wife and I make a 60 mile round trip commute nearly every day. We have gotten so used to smelling marijuana from the cars ahead of us that we hardly think of it anymore. But the bad driving associated with people intoxicated with marijuana is harder to ignore. And of course, the exploding “homelessness” issue and associated crime is a very visible result as well.
Somehow people who do not work with the public as I did do not realize that marijuana use also has a direct relationship with an increased rate of mental illness. This is to the point that nearly every psychotic individual that we had repeated contact with was a heavy marijuana user and most of those who somehow gave it up somehow were miraculously cured.
The state collected $515.2 million in taxes in 2022 from legal marijuana with a 50% “smuggling rate”. They collected $325 million from tobacco with a 41.6% “smuggling rate”. They collected $480 million from alcohol with a smuggling rate that I could not find. The legal marijuana business in Washington State was $1.4 Billion