TAXES AND TOLERATION

Alright, name one group in Illinois that wants their taxes raised?

Or this -- name one group in Illinois that is undertaxed?

Hmm... whatcha thinking? No group wants to be taxed, right?

Wrong. There is a group that is not taxed at all in Illinois. They are
fined and arrested, but not taxed. And trust me, I know, this group would
love to be taxed.

Taxes

Why would we not tax this group? Good question. Because of state
prohibition (that's right, this isn't just a federal thing), Illinois has
built a system in which no one can legally do anything with this
plant. And yet an estimated 5% of our citizens - over 500,000 people - use
it at least once a month; and those are just the ones who are truthful on a
governmental survey: some say the number may be twice as high - that up to
a million Illinois citizens use it once a month.

But no tax. In 2003, the users of this product were arrested at the rate
of 3,973 per month: with over half a million consumers of this product,
government is missing out on this enormous tax base. While we arrest less
than 1 percent of the consumers of this illegal product every month, and
which, as the Chicago Police have reported, a great percentage of the cases
are eventually dismissed, the fact then becomes apparent that there is no
tax -- that is no form of social sanction (penalty) on the other 99 percent
of the consumers. And I think if you asked them, most would welcome some
kind of tax system.

This is a net loss of millions of dollars. Also, this inability to tax the
99% of the consumers increases the cost of law enforcement and criminal
justice. By diverting resources toward arresting these individuals instead
of taxing them, we spend instead of receive. As things stand, we've got it
backwards.

Imagine a tax on this group of consumers and imagine that they want to be
taxed. Can't a compromise be reached? Half the consumers of this product
might voluntarily pay a tax, if, in exchange, they received a card and a
degree of tolerance from the community.

If 250,000 of these consumers would pay a $400 tax, the state of Illinois
would take in $100 million annually. If the number of taxable consumers is
higher than reported, tax receipts could total $150 to $200 million. Also,
by not arresting consumers with small amounts of this product, the state
would save close to $15 million using the cost of $400 per arrest that
the Chicago Police estimated.

There it is: see how the city of Chicago -- or the state of Illinois --
could devise a system of taxation without ever coming into contact with the
illegal substance. The tax buys a degree of tolerance. That's what we do
when we tax alcohol and tobacco in Illinois: we cut a deal with the
consumers of those products and we tax them, and we require them to behave
in public. And the financial input from the taxes on alcohol and tobacco is
substantial: in fiscal year 2003, the Illinois budget projected tax income
from alcohol to be $125 million and the tax on tobacco to be $400 million.
A tax on the other product would be expected to raise an amount somewhere
in-between those two, all the while saving social and criminal justice
resources.

Toleration

Now, who are these people hollering "Please Tax Me!"?

Cannabis consumers.

You see now why this is also about tolerance. We tolerate all kinds of
behavior and speech in this land of ours, but when it comes to cannabis we
find no tolerance. Illinois is a total prohibition state: you cannot
possess it, no one can grow it, not even farmers for industrial hemp, and
patients do not have safe access to their medicine. Zero tolerance is by
design intolerant. That's the point. But after more than 30 years of this
system, and the billions in lost taxes, isn't it time to think again about
what it is our laws create? Do we want a system that for the next 10 years
will arrest and criminalize over 470,000 fellow citizens, or do we want to
tax them instead and potentially raise more than a billion dollars -- all
from a group that wants to be taxed?

Just a thought, but it seems more reasonable than our current system.