Month: September 2021

Drafting a pamphlet: “What North Carolinians Need To Know About Marijuana Money.” Here’s what I’m thinking for background reading references:  

For marijuana issues generally, I don’t know a better place to start than Mark Kleiman’s Marijuana Legalization:  What Everyone Needs to Know (2d ed. 2016, with Caulkins and Kilmer, under $20), which inspired the title here.  A more technical 2015 analysis by Kleiman and others for the State of Vermont is in the public domain at https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR864.html.

Kleiman’s work is a little dated; a recent multi-author issue of the B.U. Law Review provides a good update in the public domain. https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/2021/07/14/volume-101-number-3-may-2021/.

For an ideological prohibitionist view, the group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, https://learnaboutsam.org, provides online material and offers a book for sale.  

An anti-prohibition view is thought through in a free online book by the U.K. Transform Drugs Foundation: https://transformdrugs.org/publications/how-to-regulate-cannabis-a-practical-guide

Ad valorem excise taxes are not the way to go for marijuana.  Ideological adversaries agree on that, if on little else!  The left-leaning Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy warned, in a detailed report, that ad valorem price-based “ad valorem” taxes on marijuana are a recipe for trouble when prices go down – as they do in every jurisdiction where legalization takes hold. https://itep.org/taxing-cannabis/  

More recently, the right-leaning Tax Foundation has joined the warning:  “states risk losing out on forecasted revenue if prices continue to go down.” https://taxfoundation.org/safe-banking-act-state-marijuana-revenues/

We needn’t use ad valorem taxes at all for marijuana.  Congressman Blumenauer’s latest legalization bill phases ad valorem taxes out, but keeps them too long, then compounds the error by de facto freezing them.  

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