Archive for July 22nd, 2009
[Editor's note: This post is excerpted from this week's forthcoming NORML weekly media advisory.]
Oakland voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved the nation’s first ever business tax on retail marijuana sales.
According to preliminary election results, approximately 80 percent of Oakland voters approved the new tax (which appeared on the ballot as Measure F), which imposes an additional tax for “cannabis businesses” of $18 for every $1,000 of gross receipts beginning January 1, 2010.
Presently, Oakland’s medical cannabis dispensaries are taxed at the same rate as other retail sales businesses ($60 per year for the $50,000 of gross receipts, plus $1.20 for each additional $100,000).
Four dispensaries are licensed by the Oakland City Council to sell and dispense medical marijuana.
According to a financial analysis by the Oakland City Auditor, Oakland’s new cannabis business tax will generate an estimated $300,000 in additional annual tax revenue.
Representatives from the Oakland City Council, the California Nurses Association, and the dispensary community publicly advocated for the new tax, which had no formal opposition.
“The passage of this first-in-the-nation tax further legitimizes cannabis-based enterprises in Oakland and elsewhere,” NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre said. “These outlets are contributing to the health and welfare of their local communities, both socially and now economically. At a time when many municipalities are strapped for tax revenues and cutting public services it is likely that public officials in other cities will begin considering similar proposals.”
Found on High Times
Yesterday The New York Times ran a Fashion & Style article about marijuana that, in the usual fashion and style of drug scare stories, begins and ends with cautionary anecdotes of addiction. The story hypes the alleged hazards of rising cannabis potency, which it says may be “contributing to higher addiction rates,” without quoting experts who question that claim or pointing out that marijuana users tend to compensate for higher THC content by smoking less.
At the same time, the piece makes several concessions that undermine the anti-pot thesis. It notes, for example, that the percentage of pot smokers among Americans admitted to drug treatment has “increased significantly” in the last decade or so but allows that “57 percent of those admitted for marijuana addiction treatment were ordered to do so by law enforcement.” (The significance of that concession would have been clearer had the Times mentioned that arrests for marijuana possession increased dramatically during the same period.) Here are a few other points that are not likely to show up in a DEA press release:
Addiction experts agree marijuana does not pose as serious a public health problem as cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine. The drug cannot lead to fatal overdose and its hazards pale in comparison with those of alcohol….
Advocates and even some addiction specialists say cannabis is an effective treatment for medical and emotional problems, and can even help some battling addictions to harder drugs.
The risk of addiction, they say, is less problematic than for alcohol and other drugs. For instance, of the people who had used marijuana, only 9 percent became addicted, according to a 1999 study by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, a nonprofit research organization on science and health. Of those who drank alcohol, 15 percent became addicted. For cocaine, the figure was 17 percent, and heroin, 23 percent….
Many people can smoke marijuana every day without ill effects, advocates say, just as many casually drink wine in the evening….
Marijuana withdrawal is not nearly as severe as withdrawal from most other drugs. Giving up drinking can cause fatal seizures….
Some doctors specializing in treating addicts would rather prescribe marijuana for anxiety and insomnia than sleeping pills or Valium and Xanax, which are highly addictive.
Even the opening anecdote about a writer in Manhattan who “started smoking pot when she was 15″ and calls it “a slow form of suicide” falls short of the typical tale of degradation, destitution, and disease:
“I would come home from work, close my door, have my bong, my food, my music and my dog, and I wouldn’t see another person until I went to work the next day,” said Joyce…”What kind of life is that? I did that for 20 years.”
From this account, I gather that Joyce has been gainfully employed her entire adult life and that her job pays well enough for her to afford her own apartment in Manhattan, one that is well-stocked with food and has a nice sound system. Scary stuff.
Even more encouraging than the article’s relatively restrained tone is the online debate to which it links. The Times asked five drug policy experts to address the question of whether “addiction will rise” if “marijuana is legal.” The general thrust of their answers is “maybe,” but every participant is careful to note that prohibition also carries costs that have to be taken into account, and all of them seem to support more-liberal marijuana policies, ranging from decriminalization of possession for personal use to legalization of production and sale. Since the Times presumably tried to represent a wide array of opinion, the consensus against the status quo is striking.
[Editor's note: The July 2009 issue of Socionomics has an interesting essay and series of graphs that seeks to look 5-10 years into future regarding the decidedly declining public, political and business support for cannabis prohibition. Socionomics is a subscription based publication, and the graph and first 500 words of the essay are re-printed with permission.]
The Coming Collapse of a Modern Prohibition
History shows that mood governs society’s tolerance for recreational drugs. A rising social mood produces prohibition of substances such as alcohol and marijuana; a falling mood produces tolerance and relaxed regulation. In the case of alcohol, the path from prohibition to decriminalization became littered with corruption and violence as the government waged a failed war on traffickers. Eventually, as mood continued to sour, the government finally capitulated to public cries for decriminalization as a means to end the corruption and bloodshed.
We predict a similar fate for the prohibition of marijuana, if not the entire War on Drugs. The March 1995 Elliott Wave Theorist first forecasted the Drug War’s repeal at the end of the bear market and in 2003, EWT stated that during the decline, “The drug war will turn more violent. Eventually, possession and sale of recreational drugs will be decriminalized.”
The Case of Marijuana
Social mood influences people’s actions and their social judgments. In times of positive mood, people have the resources to enforce their social desires. They can afford to express the black and white moral issues preferred during bull markets, and drug abuse is a favorite target.
During times of negative mood, on the other hand, society’s priorities change. People have other, bigger worries and begin to view recreational drugs as less dangerous, if not innocuous in offering stress relief, pain reduction and the ability to cope with the pressures of negative social mood.
Over the past 100 years, governmental activities have manifested these changing attitudes. During periods of rising mood, policymakers stepped up regulation of cannabis. During periods of falling mood, they eased those same stances.
As shown in Figure 1, each legislative attempt to restrict marijuana use followed at least three, and in most cases four or five, bull-market years. In 1937, Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act. The law banned casual consumption of the drug and limited its use to specific medical and industrial purposes. Franklin Roosevelt signed the law at the top of a roaring bull market, the Dow Jones Industrial Average having quintupled from its 1932 low. The real crackdown, however, came over a decade later during the massive wave III bull move.
The Boggs Act, which increased drug use penalties fourfold, and the Narcotics Control Act, which increased penalties another eightfold, both came during the most powerful portion of wave 3 of III of the bull market. Then in 1958, after four more years of rising mood, Wisconsin farmers harvested the last legal crop of U.S.-grown hemp. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush’s famous “War on Drugs” speech came on the heels of seven years of net progress in the stock market. In 1999, a year before the top of the Grand Supercycle bull market, the DEA banned the importation of hemp products that contained even a trace of Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), marijuana’s psychoactive ingredient.
Found on High Times
A proposal that would have effectively shut down medical-marijuana dispensaries was rejected Monday night by the Colorado Board of Health.
In addition to voting down a plan to limit medical-marijuana caregivers to five patients each, the board also refused to require that caregivers help patients with daily activities. The board did, however, agree to changes meant to prevent fraud — and left the door open to revisiting the cap on patients another time.
The decision, which came after 12 hours of testimony and deliberations, was met with a loud cheer from the 50 or so people remaining in the audience on the Auraria campus, which had numbered 500 at the start of the day. People stood up, jumped up and down and screamed.
“We’re happy the board did the compassionate thing,” said Brian Vicente, the director of Sensible Colorado, a pro-marijuana nonprofit advocacy group. “This is a win for Coloradan sick patients and the voters.”
Opponents of the changes, particularly the proposal to cap the number of patients a caregiver could have at five, said the proposals would have potentially cut off access for about 7,630 Coloradans registered as patients who can legally use the drug. Currently, caregivers sometimes take the form of dispensaries serving hundreds of patients.
Ned Calonge, the state health department’s chief medical officer, said the patient-cap proposal was based on the number that a caregiver can reasonably handle daily. Other supporters, including police officers and representatives of anti-drug groups, emphasized the proposal’s usefulness in helping law-enforcement officers control unlicensed pot-growing operations.
Patients, meanwhile, spoke of what access to marijuana had meant to them.
Jonathan Edens, an Iraq war veteran, was one of the 350 who signed up to testify at the meeting.
“When I came back from the war, I had real bad PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and torn ligaments,” said Edens, a Colorado Springs resident. “I was so addicted to pills, I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror without being disgusted. Now that I’ve started smoking marijuana, I’ve dropped 50 pounds and am off most of the medication I was on.”
Although Calonge told the board that his patient-cap recommendation was based on significant research into the number of patients a caregiver could visit in a day, several board members said they did not have enough information to accept his assessment.
After voting to reject the five-patient cap, the board briefly discussed whether a higher number should instead be imposed. They decided to pose the question to a stakeholder group that would gather more information.
Three of the nine board members voted for the cap, including the board’s president, Glenn Schlabs .
“I don’t believe we need to model our rule-making on comments of the people who came forward to speak today,” he said. “I don’t feel compelled to fashion regulation that appeals to you. That’s why we’re the board of health.”
Rick Spiegel of Centennial was one of those who signed up to speak, but his wife, Kim, who has post-stroke thalamic pain syndrome, was so tired that they left before their number was called.
“She’s been to about five different doctors, and all the drugs they gave her never worked for her syndrome,” Spiegel said. “The only thing that helped it was marijuana.”
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