does not demonstrate causation.
Marijuana use attacks, degrades, and impairs the very thing that allows us to act freely: our brains.”
Ditto for alcohol.
“A recent study conducted by the Centennial Institute looked at Colorado’s legalization regime and found that for every $1 of tax revenue generated by marijuana taxes, Coloradans paid $4.50 to mitigate marijuana-related social costs stemming from the health-care and education systems, accidental poisonings, impaired driving, and increased court costs, among other.”
I'll have to look into this one - but dollars to donuts the "marijuana-related social costs" are inflated.
“...why did Prohibition end up failing? Historians generally agree
LOL! They cite ONE historian in support - and he provides a supporting link to PERHAPS ONE other.
Your replies will be predictable...
Yet rather than head me off at the pass by pre-emptively rebutting them, you're content to copy and paste.
The report claims that Colorado spends $4.50 to mitigate the effects of marijuana legalization per dollar gained in tax revenue. However, the authors do not include cost estimates for years prior to legalization. In both the social sciences and the medical field, researchers often attempt to isolate the impact of a change in one group (the “treatment group”) from a similar group (the “control group”). In this case, the authors could have compared the current costs per year since legalization to annual costs prior to legalization when marijuana was consumed illicitly. Because the authors fail to attempt to isolate the impact, no peerreviewed academic journal would consider the findings credible (Wing et al., 2018).
A true cost-benefit analysis would include all the benefits of legalization– not just state tax revenues. These include added local tax revenues, income taxes, reduced incarceration costs, decreased policing costs, and lower legal fees. Similarly, the report fails to estimate the impact of public investments made using new tax revenue from legalized marijuana. For example, the first $40 million in state revenue from cannabis sales taxes is dedicated to school construction projects in Colorado, which boosts the local economy, creates jobs, and can enhance educational outcomes for students through improved environments for learning (e.g., see Whaley, 2018). These “multiplier effects,” or ripple effects, are absent from the analysis.
Most glaringly, the authors fail to include the impact of legalization on economic activity, or gross state product (GSP), on the benefits side of the equation. This is a remarkable omission in a cost-benefit analysis. If one were to take a this approach to the U.S. manufacturing industry, the inevitable recommendation would be to halt the production of all goods in America. That’s because there are significant costs of making goods, such as pollution, the price of materials, the costs of hiring and firing workers, and the increase in congestion and traffic accidents from welders and machinists driving to work instead of staying unemployed at home (among other costs). These costs generally exceed the total corporate and property taxes collected from manufacturing companies. Why then do we produce anything at all in America? The answer is because the manufacturing industry grows the U.S. economy, creates jobs, and supports other industries like retail and construction. In the case of marijuana legalization, residents and visitors spent more than $760 million on legal recreational marijuana in Colorado in the 12 months between July 2017 and June 2018 (Manzo et al., 2018). Ignoring this economic activity altogether is another blemish in the Centennial Institute’s analysis.
Moreover, the authors erroneously consider certain items “costs” when they should instead be listed as “benefits.” Marijuana arrests represent their biggest mistake. The authors report report that taxpayer expenditures on marijuanarelated arrests fell from $14.8 million in 2012 before legalization to $7.2 million in 2017 post-legalization (Centennial Institute, 2018). The authors inexplicably use the 2017 figure of $7.2 million and call it a “cost” of legalized marijuana despite the fact that costs have mathematically fallen by $7.6 million per year since legalization. This should obviously be listed as a benefit, not a cost.