Recent headlines proclaimed that Colorado raked in $44 million in tax revenues on recreational pot in 2014.

Amendment 64 promised voters there would be an excise tax on wholesale sales of retail marijuana, and the first $40 million raised each year by this tax would go towards public school construction.

But the 2014 revenues from that excise tax only amounted to just over $13 million.¹ That’s not much school construction; it’s probably not even one whole school building.

Even among people in the marijuana industry there’s confusion, or obfuscation, about how much money from pot sales is going to schools in Colorado. The marketing director for a marijuana-infused product quoted here claimed that $40 million of 2014’s marijuana tax revenues went to “education.”

Nope – none went to education, but $13 million (not $40 million) will eventually go to school construction.

In exchange for a few school remodels a year, Coloradans have gotten:

1. Marijuana tourists.
2. More public pot consumption.
3. Less enforcement of laws about public consumption of marijuana.
4. More pot advertisement and promotion.
5. More kids hospitalized due to consumption of marijuana edibles.
6. Less understanding that pot is harmful to teens’ brains.
7. More users among our state’s population.
8. More citizens on the medical marijuana registry than prior to legalization of recreational marijuana.
9. More pot on middle and high school campuses.

Not such a good deal for schools.

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1. Take a look at the State Department of Revenue’s numbers. Look at the Year-to-Date numbers for May and December 2014 and add them to get the total for calendar year 2014. The total of that excise tax is $13,341,000.

A wonderfully comprehensive piece about problems with legalization of marijuana by David Frum was published online today in “Commentary.”

Some highlights from the piece:

“Advocates of legalization carried the vote with a substantial campaign budget, a few million dollars, and a brilliant slogan: “Drug dealers don’t ask for ID.” The implied promise: Marijuana legalization would be joined to tough enforcement to keep marijuana away from minors.”

“With so many medical-marijuana card-holders walking about, it was simply inevitable that some would re-sell their marijuana to underage users. A 2013 study of Colorado teens in drug treatment found that 74 percent had shared somebody else’s medical marijuana.” (entire article here)

“the best customers for the marijuana industry are not adults at all. The majority of people who try marijuana quit by age 30. Adults in their twenties are significantly less likely than high school students to smoke; 14 percent of twentysomethings say they smoke marijuana, while 22.7 percent of 12th-graders smoke at least once a month, and 6.5 percent say they smoke every day.”

“the trend presents marijuana sellers with a marketing problem. Yet there is promising news from the emerging marijuana industry’s point of view: People who start smoking in their teens are significantly more likely to become dependent than people who start smoking later: about 1 in 6, as opposed to 1 in 10. Start them young; keep them longer. Very rationally, then, the marijuana industry is rolling out products designed to appeal to the youngest consumers: cannabis-infused soda, cannabis-infused chocolate taffy, cannabis-infused jujubes.” (entire article here)

“The promise that legalization will actually protect teenagers from marijuana is false. So, too, are the other promises of the legalizers. It is false to claim that marijuana legalization will break drug cartels. Those cartels will continue to traffic in harder and more lucrative drugs, such as heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. Criminal cartels may well stay in the marijuana business, too, marketing directly to underage users. Public policy is about trade-offs, and marijuana users need to face up to the trade-off they are urging on American society. Legal marijuana use means more marijuana use, and more marijuana use means above all more teen marijuana use.”

“Some older adults have a hard time crediting the dangers of marijuana use because they imagine the marijuana on sale today is the same low-grade stuff they smoked in college. The marijuana sold in the 1980s averaged between 3 and 4 percent THC, the psychoactive ingredient. Today’s selectively bred marijuana averages over 12 percent THC, with some strains reaching 30 percent.” (entire article here)

“Our brains are wired for addictions.” 

“Lucrative industries have arisen to exploit these weaknesses in ways highly harmful to their customers. And the bold irony is that when their practices are challenged, they’ll invoke the very principles of individual choice and self-mastery that their industry is based on negating and defeating. So it was with tobacco. So it is with casino gambling. So it will be with marijuana.”

Please read the entire piece by David Frum.

Vote against legalization of recreational marijuana in your state. You don’t want what we have here in Colorado.

If you don’t want legalization of recreational marijuana, vote against legalization of medical marijuana in your state. On its face, medical marijuana isn’t bad. (It’s primarily a joke, here in Colorado, but it’s not horrible.) But in the strategic plans of marijuana industry groups, medical marijuana is just one step along the way to legalization of recreational marijuana.

For legalization proponents, “regulate” is code for “legalize.” After legalization, once actual regulation starts to be implemented, the marijuana industry protests and sues and complains and lobbies… you don’t want this where you live.

Amendment 64, the amendment to the Colorado Constitution that legalizes marijuana, has some language in it that some people don’t seem to realize they voted for.

“Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the following acts are not unlawful and shall not be an offense under Colorado law… Consumption of marijuana, provided that nothing in this section shall permit consumption that is conducted openly and publicly or in a manner that endangers others.”

This language gives the Colorado state legislature, and municipal governments in Colorado, the right to prohibit open and public consumption of marijuana, and still be complying with the Constitution. It gives governments the right to regulate consumption of marijuana.

The Amendment also gives municipalities the right, under the Constitution, to “prohibit the operation of … retail marijuana stores through the enactment of an ordinance…” This gives governments the right to regulate the operations of marijuana businesses in their jurisdictions. Some have decided to prohibit retail marijuana businesses altogether.

Marijuana boosters called Denver Councilwoman Robb’s proposal to prohibit marijuana use on front lawns “unconstitutional.” They called Denver Councilwoman Ortega’s proposal to prohibit marijuana use on front lawns within 1,000 feet of schools “an attack on Amendment 64.” They mentioned “property rights” and “constitutional rights” as their reasons for demanding public marijuana use. 

All property rights and all constitutional rights have limits; regulations apply to most of our rights. There are plenty of legal things that are not allowed in view of the public, even on private residential property. People are not allowed to urinate or to have sex on their front lawns. These activities are legal, and we are allowed to do them in private, but regulations prohibit us from doing these perfectly legal things within view of others.

Amendment 64 would not have passed without allowing the prohibition of public marijuana consumption, and without allowing the local control that municipalities have. Municipalities are well within their rights to exert that control. Denver City Council has let itself be bullied by the marijuana industry, into allowing things that some voters never imagined. Front lawn pot smoking is not what many Denverites thought they were voting for.

Here’s a link to Amendment 64:  http://www.leg.state.co.us/LCS/Initiative%20Referendum/1112initrefr.nsf/c63bddd6b9678de787257799006bd391/cfa3bae60c8b4949872579c7006fa7ee/$FILE/Amendment%2064%20-%20Use%20&%20Regulation%20of%20Marijuana.pdf