Legal marijuana is no longer a budding industry, it has a record

In almost every press story related to cannabis issues in Texas, the writers include polling data indicating that a majority of Texans favor legalizing the recreational use of pot to get high. 

Majorities in Texas, of Democrats mostly, supported slavery and then Jim Crow segregation so obviously majority support does not confer rightness upon every issue. Majorities today would likely affirmatively answer any poll question that asked if each citizen should get a monthly check from the government that would cover their living expenses.  

Many people would do so because they do not stop to think about the simple fact that such a program would force them to also be the people paying for such redistribution as government has no source of funds other than from the people it governs. There would be no net gain, only net loss as the political class took its redistribution costs out of the scheme. 

I am not a Democrat and one reason is that I share the exceptional American and republican view that majority support of something does not automatically make it right; does not make it wise policy; does not obligate elected officials to support such, and; does not mean that such a majority has thoughtfully and soberly come to its position. 

Similar lack of thinking permeates the issue of legalized, regulated, and taxed pot sales and use. 

There is a greatly funded legal marijuana lobby which loves to tell lawmakers how great all would be if smoking weed were made legal. But as you’d expect, those people only tell their side of the story based mostly on fantasy and greed for drug profits. 

A big problem these merchants of getting high have is that we now have a good history in Colorado and elsewhere that allows us to check their claims against reality. 

In a Politico piece titled “Colorado’s weed market is coming down hard and it’s making other states nervous,” writer Mona Zhang wrote: “In 2020, the market soared to $2.2 billion. But just three years later, sales had plummeted to $1.5 billion, leading to layoffs, closures and downsizing. The market downturn has spelled trouble for state finances too: Colorado took in just $282 million in cannabis tax revenues in the last fiscal year, down more than 30 percent from two years earlier.” 

The story documents a supply glut, the spread of “cheap, largely unregulated intoxicating hemp-derived products,” and a host of other things that have pulled the rug out from under the original sales pitch to lawmakers about how much tax money they would get from the enterprise. 

Also the story demonstrates that no matter what you do, some other state will move to undercut you so that much weed buying business goes elsewhere. And then there is also the complaint about the cost of regulation but regulation for “safe weed” is one of the original lies told to justify legalization. 

A big argument made by the marijuana lobby and many Democrats relates to crime and imprisonment. They claim that jails and prisons are full of people whose only crime was getting high on marijuana and that this, of course, disproportionately harms minorities. 

Interestingly, Colorado’s crime rate is, at present, considerably higher than Texas’ and so is pot-legal New Mexico’s rate. (Data found at: https://cdoc.colorado.gov/about/data-and-reports/statistics)

In 2022, Colorado had a crime rate of 3,640 per 100,000 people while the Texas rate was significantly lower at 2,732 per 100,000. New Mexico was at 3,764 per 100,000. 

Those numbers show the crime rates in Texas’ legal pot neighbors to be much higher than in the Lone Star State which calls into question any argument that prohibitions on pot use create a better environment. 

Colorado’s incarceration rate has indeed fallen since it legalized marijuana in 2014 but that trend began well prior to 2014. It began to edge back up in 2021 and 2022, the last full year of data on the official Colorado site, but is still much lower than the incarceration rate in Texas. Colorado’s 2022 incarceration rate is 288 per 100,000 compared to Texas’ rate of 452 per 100,000.

What I see in that data is that Colorado residents, with their legal weed, are simply trading a much higher crime rate for a lower incarceration rate. New Mexico’s numbers show the same and this fits with the Democrat-Leftist “social justice” program they often call “prison reform” which is nothing more than allowing crime to flourish due to much less incarceration of criminals. 

Clearly the great government income promise from legal pot hasn’t proven out and neither has there been an improvement in crime rates when compared to Texas where marijuana use and possession is illegal. There is also little to no data that demonstrates that tax revenue derived from recreational weed sales outweighs other costs coming from more psychotropic drug use.  

Those points certainly do not mean that society cannot decide that it has other reasons justifying legalizing marijuana, but the data points, after a decade of legality in Colorado, do make a mockery of the most often cited justifications by politicians and the pot lobbyists blowing the smoke of faulty argument at them.

This column also appeared in the July, 2024 edition of the famed Buffalo Gap Round-Up News!