Editor’s note: This commentary is by Catherine Antley, MD, a community medical doctor.
[M]any of our legislators think that taxing marijuana will create a new revenue source for Vermont. Unfortunately, they are only half right. Commercializing and taxing marijuana will indeed raise some money, but that simple statement ignores the majority of the costs to the state. When you subtract the cost, half of the equation, Vermont ends up with a glaring deficit.
This is the fatal problem with any taxed retail system where the products being taxed are addictive, impair driving coordination, and can cause known physical and mental harm. We are already experiencing this with our current taxed, commercialized addictive products, tobacco and alcohol.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse says total revenue from tobacco taxes and fees in 2010 was $17 billion. Standing alone like that, it’s a huge sum. But NIDA also says tobacco cost our country $300 billion that same year in costs such as lost work productivity, and health care, and let’s not forget administration and prevention education. For every dollar we gained, we spent $17.
But imagine what we would have spent if we hadn’t had the huge tobacco lawsuit and settlement to help fund prevention education that reduced tobacco use rates. To be clear, our decrease in tobacco use happened, to a great extent, due to the multi-billion dollar settlement money (over the tax) paid by these companies to the public coffers for industry wrongdoing, racketeering; these companies continued to make and execute a plan to advertise to children in order to more easily and intentionally create dependence, while knowing that the product is harmful to those children and to the adults they would become.
We tax alcohol but have not seen the reduction in use which we have with cigarettes. We have not had a multi-billion dollar infusion of money for alcohol prevention, as we have from the tobacco settlement for tobacco prevention.
It’s foolish to think that we will have better success with marijuana. We have only to look at the situation in the states that have already legalized and commercialized recreational marijuana. They have found it impossible to simultaneously fund public health and safety costs resulting from increased marijuana dependence, while also trying to reduce their existing black markets.
A central problem with the model is that the commercial marijuana industry must “focus on creating and maintaining … heavy users; dependence is good the bottom line… Our free speech doctrine makes it very hard to restrict advertising and marketing.” -Dr. Beau Kilmer VT Rand Report author, at Vermont Senate Finance Committee Testimony 1/19/2016.
In the face of increasing costs arising from an industry which encourages increasing use and dependence, Colorado tried lowering their taxes to reduce the legal price. Per-user revenue went down, while crime and public health costs continued to increase and the black market remained as strong as ever. Oregon has a very low tax rate and still suffers from a severe black market problem (of product grown largely illegally on public forest land).
Our current laws allow limited home grows but don’t allow or encourage a legal industry which is incentivized to have more Vermonters start using heavily, to “create and maintain” dependency. And they don’t tell the half lie that we’re going to be able to pay the bill. Or that taxes will make up for the increased use and abuse rates arising from commercialization. These costs will be paid by individual Vermont families across the state caring for loved ones and by our hospital system treating more marijuana hyperemesis (vomiting) syndrome and other costly harms associated with increased marijuana use, like first episode psychosis, or by public safety through increased police interventions. Insurers like Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont and publicly funded Medicaid, already stretched due to increasing visits for mental illness in Vermont emergency rooms, will be required to pay for these increasing costs of marijuana commercialization. These costs — the financial costs and the human costs of increased dependence and other harms resulting from commercialization — are about us, all of us and they will visit every single extended Vermont family and budget. Directly or indirectly we all pay.
