Use marijuana taxes to boost addiction treatment, research

The stampede to legalize recreational pot has two sides.

One the one hand, the criminalization of marijuana has caused immense, unnecessary suffering, largely visited on those who use it casually and personally, like other folks use vodka or wine. The human toll in jail time, criminal record and accompanying stigma has clearly not worked. A society that luxuriates in booze and cigarettes has no rational basis for jailing pot smokers.

On the other hand, easing access to intoxicating drugs will cost us dearly. We needn’t repeat the litany of arguments about gateway drugs, and the prophylactic effect of social disapproval to realize that more people and more kids will be using pot when legalized.

The political momentum behind legalization is enormous. It is an expression of generational change: Younger people can’t abide the human toll we have exacted under pot prohibition. It is a vehicle for highly desirable social change: It’s about damn time that we expunged the criminal records of small users over past decades and let them live free of a criminal record. It is an opportunity to redress past inequities: It could be an opportunity to create wealth that includes communities that are often bypassed when such bounty appears.

But there is a dark side to all this which, if not constrained, will undo all the good intentions. There is a quiet interest in many quarters in using pot legalization to raise tax revenues.

In most discussions this would be perfectly appropriate. It is commonplace and smart to consider the revenue benefits of new public inclinations. But we have made a fetish of decreasing broad-based taxes, like the income tax, and taxes on the wealthy, like the estate tax, and increasing “sin” taxes that are regressive and smack poor and working people hardest. Lotteries and casinos came first. Now sports betting has arrived. Tobacco taxes keep increasing, all on the grounds of deterring undesirable behaviors. Those who disapprove of automobiles push a regressive congestion tax and those who fear climate change want a regressive carbon tax.

You can see the same sort of thinking insinuating itself into the pot debate. Pot taxes ought to rebuild subways, or fund schools, or pay for health care. That is not the way to figure out how to handle mass access to drugs.

The short-term fiscal attractiveness of legal marijuana can blind us to the longer-term fiscal impacts. We ought to figure out the true extent of the direct and collateral damage about to be caused and apply funds to those problems before we send pot taxes to our favorite program. For example, nobody really knows how to cure addiction. Twelve-step programs abound, expensive therapeutic ranches abound, drug therapies abound. Which work? Which get public funds? Which are the domain of charlatans?

Here’s a modest proposal. If you want to legalize pot, then keep the money in the drug abuse arena. Fund schools and mass transit, to be sure, but do it by raising broad-based taxes, not using the nickels and dimes of recreational marijuana users. New York can lead the attack on addiction and help figure out what will work to end the suffering of alcoholics, drug abusers, and addicts of all kinds. That would be a mitzvah.

It would also clear our heads and ensure that the rush to legalization was about social policy, not the availability of new dollars. In the end, pot legalization borders on the inevitable. How we go about it is the arena of hard choices. Its implementation will tell us more than we may want to know about what really matters to us.