Far more popular than any politician, cannabis legalization is still being sold to American voters on a wobbly raft of lofty and discursive promises, uneasily lashed together with sinews of money.
Several years into the experiment, cannabis is absolutely a multi-billion-dollar industry, but legal weed hasn’t fixed systemic racism, cured the ills of the drug war, or democratized business opportunities. Legalization hasn’t even guaranteed Americans reliable access to legal cannabis, in the states that have legalized.
But at least one promise has been kept: legalization has been great for cops.
You would not know it by listening to police complain about enforcing “drugged driving,” a task already on their plates, or lament obsolete K-9 drug-sniffing units, but legalization has been a literal windfall for American police, who in many states are guaranteed beneficiaries of cannabis taxes, a privilege not afforded to schools, healthcare, transportation, or other functions of the state.
In California, after all regulatory costs are paid for, 20 percent of cannabis taxes are set aside for law enforcement. In Oregon, the figure is 35 percent. Even cannabis taxes not earmarked for cops have ended up in police budgets—and, of course, any city or state’s “general fund,” into which most cannabis sales taxes are deposited, is also available to police. (In Canada, the affront is even more personal: former high-ranking cops became executives for cannabis companies.)
Bureaucracies cost money and legalization won’t work without rules, but earmarking weed revenue for police isn’t a policy choice so much as a deliberate political technique, a “sop to law enforcement” so that cops and cop lobbies wouldn’t oppose legalization, said Sam Kamin, a law professor at the University of Denver and a legalization expert.
“I don’t want to say it’s buying off law enforcement, but it’s buying off law enforcement,” he said. “It’s to say, look: there’s something in here for everyone. It’s not an anti-law enforcement measure.”
Legal bribe or good politics, the trick hasn’t always worked. Even after winning their earmark, California cop lobbies still opposed that state’s legalization measure in 2016. But in 2020, entitlements for police hits differently.
After a summer of protest marches following the police killing of George Floyd and a serious re-examination of police budgets—all in the context of solemn conversations about austerity, with municipal and state budgets emptied out by the COVID-19 pandemic—law enforcement receiving cannabis dollars first is infuriating social-justice advocates, as a squabble over legalization dollars in New Jersey is demonstrating.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy won office in 2017 campaigning on the promise to legalize cannabis within his first 100 days in office. He couldn’t do it, so Murphy and leaders of the Democratic Party-controlled state legislature passed the task onto voters.
On Election Day, a constitutional amendment to legalize cannabis passed by a more than two-to-one margin. But Question 1 contained absolutely no details—not even possession limits. All that would be up to state lawmakers, responsible for follow-up “enabling” legislation.
The first bill, sponsored by Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney and Sen. Nicholas Scutari, appeared…
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