“Just how do you propose taxing an item for which there is an established tax free market which currently avoids the law?”
The same way they do on alchohol. My sweetie & I make our own wine - legally. The amount we can produce is limited & we can’t sell it. But there are lots of dope-heads who don’t have a green thumb & would be just as happy to buy it as try to grow it. Better quality, too.
Legalizing makes sense even if they can’t tax it. At least we wouldn’t be paying for the cops to waste their time on it & we wouldn’t be locking up otherwise law-abiding folks who want a toke now & then.
I'm sure you are right about that. Look at the medical marijuana dispensaries in California and the coffeeshops in the Netherlands. People with medical marijuana cards are allowed to grow their own, yet these dispensaries are doing gangbusters business even though they sell super expensive pot, often 420 or $30 a gram, hundreds of dollars an ounce. In the Netherlands people are allowed to grow five plants for personal use, yet their coffeeshops that are allowed to sell marijuana do gangbusters business. Hardly anyone grows their own. A smaller percentage of their population than ours smokes it too, even though it's illegal here.
Americans consume an awful lot of marijuana. More marijuana is consumed in this country than all other illegal drugs combined. According to the last estimate from our government that I saw there are between 12,000 and 25,000 metric tons of marijuana available in this country every year. If the actual number is closer to the high end of that, most is produced here. If it's closer to the low end, most is produced in Mexico. According to our Office of Drug Control Policy Mexican drug trafficking organizations make around $13.8 billion a year selling drugs to Americans, about $8.6 from marijuana alone. That's about 62% of their gross sales to Americans. They gross about $3.9 billion from cocaine, the second most popular drug. Their net proceeds from marijuana are probably much higher than 62% of their total proceeds from drug sales to Americans because they are only the middlemen for cocaine which must first be purchased and smuggled from South America before it is smuggled into this country.
If we legalized marijuana and allowed American farmers with permits grow it and allowed for it to be sold from licensed shops, similar to the way we regulate alcohol, it would be a devastating blow to Mexican organized crime. We'd be taking their cash cow from them. It would be a devastating blow to other organized crime groups operating within our borders that derive a substantial portion of their income from marijuana sales. With large farms growing it like we grow other crops, the wholesale cost of it would be a fraction of what it is today. The only thing that could keep prices anywhere close to current prices would be taxes and regulatory costs. People aren't going to want to buy it on the street and most won't want to go to the trouble of growing their own. They'll want to go to nice clean shops where they can select from a wide variety of quality product and tax paying law abiding citizens will be making the money from it and paying taxes on what they make. We'll save a fortune that we are currently spending trying in vain to keep up this ban, and we'll bring in billions in tax revenues that we aren't getting now on all the many billions of dollars worth of marijuana being consumed in this country every year.
“Legalizing makes sense even if they can’t tax it.”
I agree with that too, but I think the government can and will tax it when it finally is legalized. Being legal the actual cost of this stuff will be far lower than it is today. There will be a lot of room for taxes before they get so high that it will encourage a black market or encourage that many to go to all the trouble of spending months growing their own. It wouldn't take long before those that smoke it will have their favorite kinds they like to pick up at the “pot store.” They won't want crappy homegrown or something grown in the woods by criminals who treat it with God knows what kind of toxic chemicals. Given the choice, most will buy it from the store, just like most buy their booze and smokes from the store.
Which takes more time and effort....making alcoholic beverages, or sticking a couple seeds in the ground? If it were legal every garden and flower bed would have pot plants growing in it. Pretty hard to regulate and tax something that would be growing EVERYWHERE!