Arizona has a medical marijuana law, but citizens and legislators are considering legalizing marijuana for recreational use for adults. That's good because it will free law enforcement resources currently wasted on marijuana enforcement.
Today there are more important issues law enforcement needs to be concerned with:
Like keeping track of sex offenders every day, not once a year in a publicized roundup on TV, but every day of the year.
Like having the resources to return felons wanted for crimes, such as burglary, theft and assault. When police stop wanted felons in other states, you think they would be arrested and returned to face trial and punishment, but dispatchers have to grit their teeth, and tell their officer the originating agency won't extradite. They just let the wanted felon go.
Like identity theft, cybercrime is one of the fastest growing crime categories. Attacks happen daily against the computers of individuals, corporations and government agencies. These attacks are done by high school kids, and by highly organized and funded attacks by foreign governments.
Smart Arizona legislators realize that if passed a voter initiative takes a 3/4 vote of the House and the Senate to make changes. So if legislators want to have any say on how the new law is written, they need to pass it themselves.
There are some things legislators just don't get. If lawmakers don't listen, they're going to write a law that will allow criminals and cartels to continue making millions of dollars for many years.
Legislators need to understand marijuana is cheap to grow. If they place too high a tax, like the $50 an ounce tax one Arizona legislator recently proposed, the black market will continue to prosper for years to come.
The Estimated Cost of Production for Legalized Cannabis (1) says that not counting labor, it costs $25 per POUND, or about $1.50 an ounce to grow high quality marijuana indoors, or about $8 per pound, or 50 cents per ounce outdoors without labor.
Black market U.S. sellers and marijuana grown outdoors in the U.S. by Mexican cartels could sell their marijuana for $50 an ounce and still make a nice profit.
Currently, Mexican marijuana sells for about $800 per pound in Phoenix. You need to consider the cartels have expenses on each pound they sell.
They need to pay someone to grow the marijuana, someone to harvest, dry, and guard the marijuana. Then they need someone to transport it to the border and someone to smuggle it across the border. Now they need someone to store the marijuana in the U.S. until it's sold by someone else.
Still, after all those expenses Mexican marijuana sells for around $800 per pound. It doesn't cost a lot to grow marijuana. U.S. growers don't have those expenses, so prices will drop rapidly as more marijuana is grown. Setting a flat per ounce tax won't work. The tax needs to be a percentage like most other taxes.
The only way to get criminals and cartels out of the marijuana business is for legislators to stop expecting black market prices to continue once marijuana is legal. Somehow when we passed our state non-profit medical marijuana laws, the price stayed at black market prices.
(1) The Estimated Cost of Production for Legalized Cannabis
http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WR764.html
