A funny thing happened on Pueblo, Colorado’s method to becoming the” Napa Valley of cannabis”, according to a fresh Wall Street Journal report, a town where” The roads were going to be paved with gold… The elementary schools were going to be the greatest in the country” . ,
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Left unanswered: in a city selling that much weed, nobody did remember to get their children up from school.
I children, I kid… generally.  ,
” The day after legal recreational pot arrived in Pueblo in 2014, 50 people were camped out in front of one of the first weed shops, waiting for the doors to open”, the Journal reported, and the two licensed shops in Pueblo County “rang up a combined$ 1 million in sales the first month, sending$ 56, 000 in taxes to the county”.
But a century later, the WSJ continued,” Pueblo’s goals have gone up in smoke. A once-thriving business of merchants, gardeners, and cannabis-oil extractors—there were more than 200 for companies in the state in 2017—has collapsed. Just 45 remain, condition data indicate. County tax revenue related to cannabis plunged from more than$ 7.1 million in 2021 to$ 4.8 million in 2023″.
That’s despite normal pot or Marijuana apply hitting record highs last month, so to speak.
The disappointment isn’t limited to Pueblo or even to Colorado — one of the first two states to legalize weed and presumably enjoying a first-mover advantage.  ,
The New York Post ran a typically breathless headline in January, touting “extraordinary” tax receipts from marijuana. ” The Empire State is expected to generate$ 161.8 million in tax revenues from its legal weed business for the fiscal year ending March 31— or four times what it raked in last year”, the Post reported.
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What the Post didn’t report is that just five years ago, experts estimated that” New York could generate around$ 300 million in tax revenue”.
In California, where pot was legalized in 2016, The Atlantic reported a few weeks ago that” cannabis excise and sales taxes peaked in 2021, by the first quarter of 2023, they were reported as accounting for only 0.2 percent of total state tax collections”.
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2021 was the year that Sacramento offered”$ 100 million to rescue its struggling legal marijuana industry”, and no, I did not make this up.
” Not all taxes due even get collected, in 2023, for instance, 15 percent of the state’s cannabis firms defaulted on taxes they owed”, the article said. Taxes and regulations on California’s legal stuff are high and imposing enough that” state officials readily acknowledge the industry still operates mostly in the shadows”, CapRadio reported last year.
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Revenues generated by black market marijuana remain, of course, zero.  ,
Maybe the problem is that the math never did add up.
This was an old saw, or at least a joke, among my hippie friends in Northern California:” Legalize it, tax it, and that’s the deficit right there, man”. Taxing a weed hard enough to generate that kind of revenue runs into the same wall that declaring war on it did. Weed is… a weed. It grows anywhere, oftentimes by people without much regard for the law, and putting big taxes on marijuana drives growers into the black market just as effectively as criminalization did.
Maybe there’s a workable policy for decriminalized or legalized weed somewhere, but, wherever it is, politicians have yet to find it.  ,
Recommended:  , Burn, Baby Burn: Another Lefty Has Some Deliciously Bad Advice for Dems
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