The Cannabis Manifesto by Steve DeAngelo

Author:Steve DeAngelo [DeAngelo, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: LAW093000 Law / Medical Law & Legislation, SOC000000 Social Science / General
ISBN: 9781583949382
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2015-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

6

Cannabis Should Be Taxed and Regulated as a Wellness Product

“The power to tax is the power to destroy.”

—John Marshall, the fourth Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court

My brother, Andrew, handed me a heavy brown envelope imprinted with the IRS logo. “The past-due bill is $2.5 million for our first two years of operation.”

I’d been expecting something like this since the day we opened Harborside. Way back in 1997, the IRS had tried to close down the CHAMP dispensary by declaring it a drug-trafficking organization.1 Now they were doing the same thing to us.

Unfair taxation has been a part of prohibition since its beginning—the original 1937 Marijuana Tax act did not make cannabis itself illegal. Instead, the law imposed a tax fifty times the current selling price and required advance payment to the federal government. It was actually designed to act as a ban, not just a revenue source.2

Today’s prohibitionists continue to play the same game. As more states pass some form of legalization, and debate shifts from the law to regulation, die-hard reform opponents are seizing the opportunity to advocate for excessive taxes, absurd zoning ordinances, unworkable business models, and the most restrictive regulations possible. Their version of legalization is designed to strangle the new industry in its cradle, and would be prohibition in everything but name.

There’s plenty of room for legitimate, well-intentioned disagreement about cannabis regulation. No single model will fit all communities, and every successful one will require flexibility and goodwill. Competing interests and viewpoints must be aired, disagreements discussed, and compromises negotiated—but now that the majority of U.S. citizens favor legalization, the primary goal of regulation should be normalizing the role of cannabis in our society, not doing an end run around the will of the voters.

Opponents and advocates were just about evenly matched when Oakland became the first jurisdiction in the United States to regulate retail sales of cannabis in 2005. The only way to avoid political impasse was to develop a set of win-win regulations. After some heated debate, compromises were reached on the number of dispensaries, the required conditions of operation, and the permit allocation process. Everybody left the table with something they could live with, and all were well invested in the success of the plan.

The city has never received a single complaint about our operations. We’ve created more than one hundred well-paying jobs, have dramatically reduced crime rates in our neighborhood, and enjoy outstanding relationships with the city council, mayor, and city attorney. Harborside provides a wide range of free services and enthusiastically participates in just about every civic improvement program imaginable.

Oakland was lucky—it avoided the most destructive regulations advocated by reform opponents. These fall into four general categories: overtaxation, denial of services, prohibition of home growing, and a variety of limitations on use, production, and distribution.

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