State Representative Mary Lou Dickerson (D-36) filed a bill yesterday in the state house that, if passed, would legalize the possession, cultivation, and sale of marijuana. Moreover, it would tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol—thereby helping salvage our state budget. Here’s a glimpse at the financial potential of the bill: A 2006 study found that Washington State’s pot crop has an estimated annual value of $1,030,015,000 (.pdf), so if the state applied the same tax rate to pot that we do to cigarettes ($2 for a pack of cigarettes, more than half the pre-tax cost) we could generate over $500 million in revenue every year.

It seems like a long shot, obviously, so I asked bill co-sponsor State Rep. Roger Goodman (D-45) what his goal is: “I would like the the bill to help us engage in a serious discussion about a rational regulation of marijuana so we can get it out of the schools and off the street,” Goodman said. “Although current federal law could be interpreted to prevent this, that should not prevent us from having a very serious discussion.”

But let’s be honest. This bill won’t pass. I doubt it will even get a hearing. Here’s some of the text:

(1) Legalize marijuana and its derivatives;

(2) Remove all existing civil and criminal penalties for adults twenty-one years of age or older who cultivate, possess, transport, sell, or use marijuana, without impacting existing laws proscribing dangerous activities while under the influence of marijuana, or certain conduct that exposes younger persons to marijuana;

(3) Raise funds and discourage substance abuse by the imposition of a tax on the legal sale of marijuana, the proceeds of which will support drug education and awareness; and

(4) Impose a set of rules and laws concerning marijuana comparable to those imposed on alcohol.

Although this is pie in the sky (at least in 2010), this is a savvy move by Dickerson. Introducing this bill isn’t about this bill. It’s about making a separate decriminalization bill active in the state legislature seem less threatening. That bill would reduce the penalty for marijuana possession—currently up to a $1,000 fine and 90 days in jail—to a $100 infraction.

Creating a range of legislation—some moderate and some extreme—makes the more moderate bills more palatable. For instance, lawmakers also introduced gay-marriage bills in the same year the legislature passed three domestic-partnership bills. Domestic partnership seemed so tame by comparison. The tactic also demonstrates to the all-or-nothing “gay marriage now!” howlers that the legislature isn’t ready for outright gay marriage (or they would have passed it). Likewise, some pro-legalization folks say we shouldn’t decriminalize pot—we need to tax it and regulate it—and not settle for any interim measure. But the legislature is not ready. Hell, they’re barely ready to reduce the penalties for possession (the decrim bill stalled in the state senate last year). But Dickerson’s bill makes decrim seem safe, which of course, it is. If Dickerson can introduce a pot legalization bill without fear of losing her seat, then surely lawmakers from other districts can vote for a tame decrim bill and keep their seats.

30 replies on “A Smart Pot Strategy in the State House”

  2. Since I think she’s in charge of her committee, it will get a hearing.

    But aren’t there at least three different bills in the House and Senate to legalize MJ, decriminalize it (traffic fine), and not burn up all our taxes with non-violent offenders possessing less than 40 grams of it?

    And aren’t they all from the 36th?

    Speaking of which: where the heck are our 43rd and 32nd and other district legislators on these bills to reduce the tax burden on our poor taxpayers of this insane drug war on MJ?

  3. @ 2) Dickerson is chair of the Human Services Committee, which is most certainly not going to hear a bill addressing criminal law. I’d guess it will be referred to Rep. Chris Hurst’s Public Safety & Emergency Preparedness Committee.

  5. Dominic, you dropped three zeros from the annual crop value in WA. It should be $1,030,015,000 or $1.03 billion. The number you show is $1.03 million.

  7. we need to ask every legislator how much pot they smoked, how many of them found their kids smoking pot or had friends who smoked pot, and how they can justify keeping it illegal when they didn’t nark out themselves, their kids or their friends.

    Seriously.

    that’s the dicussion, and this bill promotes it.

    and btw isn’t that $300 million the cost of the basic health plan??

  8. I agree with Dominic that it is unlikely this bill will pass this year, but that shouldn’t stop us for writing letters of support to our representatives for decriminalization. A serious grassroots campaign could one day usher in a sane drug policy.

  9. Would legalizing at the state level lose us federal funding for anything? IIRC, states can lower their drinking age to 18 if they want, but in doing so they risk losing a lot of federal transportation funding. I’d assume there would be a similar means of discouraging legalization at the state level.

  10. sorry, I was thinking of the Senate bill and that chair.

    Still, why aren’t OUR legislators in the 43rd and other Seattle districts doing THEIR jobs?

  12. It’s like the old joke: “What’s the easiest way to ask for a million dollars?…Ask for two million first.” It’s totally true. And we really do need to get people to realize that marijuana can be a source of revenue if handled appropriately instead of a giant money sink. This is definitely a step in the right direction.

  14. Liberals Are Useless

    http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/libe…

    Posted on Dec 7, 2009

    By Chris Hedges

    Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.

    I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.

    “You have a tug of war with one side pulling,” Ralph Nader told me when we met Saturday afternoon. “The corporate interests pull on the Democratic Party the way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a ‘least-worst’ voter you don’t want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so you call off the anti-war demonstrations in 2004. You don’t want to disturb Obama because McCain is worse. And every four years both parties get worse. There is no pull. That is the dilemma of The Nation and The Progressive and other similar publications. There is no breaking point. What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.”

    I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky’s depraved character, have come to believe that the “conscious inertia” of the underground surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground. This choice does not satisfy the Mouse Man, as it does not satisfy our liberal class, but neither has the strength to change. The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.

    Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing—and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry. At what point do we stop being a doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if we step outside the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and integrity.

    I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to “credentialize” yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these “revolutionaries” found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.

    I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would joke, “I hope we get mugged.” They knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them.

    I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire—self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.

    Chris Hedges, author of “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle,” will speak with other anti-war activists at Lafayette Park across the street from the White House at 11 a.m. Dec. 12 in a rally calling for the withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

  16. Seems like a $1000 fine would raise more than a $2 a pack tax- the key is to find all those selfish potheads who are not paying their fair share and squeeze the $1000 fine out of them.

  18. Your math is off, Dominic. Average retail price of cigarettes is $6/pack. The retail price is $3/pack pre-tax, $1/pack federal tax, and about $2/pack state tax. (Source: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/lo…). The state tax on the product is $2 of every $6 pack or about 50%, not the 33% you used.

    For gross planning purpuses, pot tax at the same rate state taxes cigs would raise about $500 million in tax revenues on $1 billion in sales.

  21. Whoops – actually it’s a 66% tax: $2/pack state tax on $3/pack retail or pre-tax item.

    So $1B in pre-tax pot sales would yield $666M in tax revenues.

  22. @ 16) Even if all the 11,000 people arrested annually for marijuana in Washington were fined $1,000, that would only generate $11 million. Not to insult your intelligence, but that’s less than taxing it. (Of course, not all those folks are fined $1,000, because most go to jail instead, which costs millions of dollars.)

  23. Cigarette tax $2.025 per pack of 20. It’s the 6th highest in the country. How many joints does $1 billion buy?

    Well, webhigh.com says pot is selling for around $10 per gram in Tacoma. That means around 100,000,000 grams per year. If a small joint contains .5 grams, then there are 200,000,000 joints. At the cigarette rate, that comes to 10 million packs.

    10,000,000 packs x $2.025 per pack = $20,250,000 in tax revenue. Of course at the current street rate, a pack of 20 joints would cost about $100 plus tax.

    On the other hand, considering a joint costs about $5, you could argue that a $1/joint tax means a joint would cost $6 – around what a mixed drink costs in a bar.

    A $1/joint tax would then raise around $200,000,000 per year.

    On the other hand (yeah, i know — three hands now, so call this the reach around option) the state tax on liquor is 51.9%. If we tax pot at the same rate, then the state potentially be looking at $500,000,000 per year in new tax revenue.

  24. I’m all for legalizing pot, but this is fuzzy math at best.

    First, the estimate of $1.3 billion worth of pot annually is little more than a wild guess. And that guess is based on the price of illegally grown and distributed pot. If pot were legally grown as a farm crop, and sold in stores like cigarettes or beer, it would cost a fraction of what it does now as an illegal crop sold by drug dealers. Furthermore, if it was legal, lots more people would smoke it, or smoke it more often. So that estimate is almost completely useless.

    Second, it would be silly to assume that WA would tax pot at exactly the same rate as cigarettes. Do they tax $2 on a six-pack of beer? No. The tax on cigarettes is high because: (1) it is intended to discourage smoking, and (2) to raise money to mitigate the cost the state pays in health care for smokers. There would be no such justification to tax pot at the same rate.

    Finally, not everybody SMOKES pot. It can be consumed in cookies and brownies, and a variety of other ways. Pot wouldn’t necessary be sold in pre-rolled cigarette form. It would likely be sold loose, to be consumed in whatever fashion the user wants. And there is no practical method to tax people who grow their own.

    Sure, legalizing pot and taxing it would raise some money, but this estimate of $500 million annually is almost completely fabricated, and utterly bullshit.

  25. I got some better math for you.

    How about if we make all people who don’t want to have us legalize pot for sale in liquor stores pay a prorated tax on what it costs the rest of us for this insane drug war.

    That’s what … $4000 per person?

    Pay up.

  26. @24- Legalized pot would be sold loose, in cigarettes form, and incorporated into food products. It’ll probably come in novelty collectors containers and stuff like that. Christmas gift baskets with Santa shaped pot chocolates and red/green striped blunts.

    The tax structure would have to take that into consideration. Not that hard, really.

    But your larger point, that any number people come up with is kind of nonsense, is completely true.

  28. 22
    no no Dom, you miss the point.
    We’re not talking just about the stoners who get arrested- ALL pot smokers could pony up the $1000 without waiting to get pinched by the Man.
    We know Liberals are so eager to pay more taxes and show their patrotism by paying lots of taxes without complaining so every good stoner in Washington (there must be, what- 3 or 4 million of’em…) will be eager to pay a $1000 fine for the privilege of toking.

  29. @28
    I know you are being facetious and just mucking up the discussion with stupid commentary, however you may be on to something.

    There could be a license to grow, smoke and buy/sell pot that costs $X/year as an alternative to a straight up sales tax. I know I would gladly pay a large amount of money to have the freedom to do with pot what I will. Think of a medical marijuana card that only requires meeting the basic age requirements and agreement to be responsible to apply.

    Of course, that whole license idea is pretty lame from a privacy/freedoms standpoint – I’d prefer an enormous sales tax (50% or more) as a way of making pot a legitimate product. Hell, assuming the street price of weed after legalization drops dramatically, I’d still be more than happy to pay current street prices just to establish that I am a responsible taxpaying citizen.

    Keynesians wants to spend their way out of a recession, I’d prefer to smoke my way out…

  30. FYI: Since HB2401 appears to have been crafted mainly by duplicating Washington State alcohol laws, one big gaping hole I see in HB2401 is a provision for home-growing, much like home-brewing. The reason is likely that home-brewing is allowed and defined under federal law, rather than state law, so it simply wasn’t there when they copied state law.

    If HB2401 turns out to be an “Ensign Red-Shirt”, then it won’t matter this time around. But, any future state bill that hopes to achieve parity with Alcohol must specifically address the home growing option, since nothing allowing it is present at the federal level.

    Please correct me if I’m wrong.

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