Tax Profits from Legal Cannabis

As I scanned down the articles “A Toke and a Tax” was the first one to really catch my eye, well enough to actually click on it anyways, and I was impressed with the level of realism put forth by the article for proposed policy of legalizing and taxing marijuana, as well as the seriousness with which the writer, Jeremy Singer-Vine, went about examining the different theories of taxing. What is really intriguing to me is the different theories on which cannabis (cannabis is the name of the plant) could be taxed and why the opposing camps support their theories over the other. One proposal is that, like alcohol and tobacco, cannabis be given a large excise tax at the counter; the other proposes that the growers pay a large tax or license to grow cannabis and hence this would raise the price.

The two things that struck me most about the article was 1) the perceived audience the writer was focusing on and 2) the manipulation of the audience by assuming some things and effectively not knowing most others. First, the perceived audience is obviously liberals, but not only that, cannabis users or those who could vote on the issue in states such as ours. The writer is fully conscious of this with his several uses of marijuana related jargon, like “spliff” and “toke”, as well as his appeals to emotion and ethics with several references to ridiculous marijuana laws (like taxes just to add tax evasion to any other charge of someone arrested with marijuana). Second, he manipulates the audience very well in his assumption of some things, like marijuana is actually already legal which he plays off very well making a rather convincing argument by the end of the article without even really saying anything about it; and the complete unknowing of others, he doesn’t proclaim to know which is the best way to tax the plant, but simply proves either way is better than the current situation. Which of course he makes quite apparent is not working by adding one more fact at the end, the 13 billion dollars the U.S. spends on arresting and incarcerating marijuana users. Obviously this is a case where the law makes the criminals, not the criminals breaking the law.

The other thing I found rather ironic was that the one misspelling of “state Legislature” which reads “slate Legislature,” the name of the website is of course Slate.com , maybe an intentional mistake.