As California's finances go to pot, a new idea for taxes emerges

AMERICA: DRIVING INTO downtown Los Angeles this week carried its usual sense of dread, heightened a little by the traffic reporter's announcement that there had already been 20 crashes that morning on the stretch of freeway I was travelling in my rented white Mustang.

It was towards the end of the morning rush hour and a couple of exits were closed because of Michael Jackson’s memorial service, but the traffic seemed to be lighter than I remembered.

The streets downtown were emptier still and the multistorey carpark I drove into was half-deserted.

Traffic congestion has eased all over the United States, according to the 2009 Urban Mobility Report, published this month by the Texas Transportation Institute. Rising unemployment and falling economic output mean that fewer people need to leave home; with a jobless rate of 11.4 per cent, Los Angeles is in tune with the national trend.

California, which is running a budget deficit of more than $26 billion (€18.6 billion), finally went broke this week and started paying bills with IOUs. Public employees who are not being laid off have been told to take at least two unpaid leave days a month and governor Arnold Schwarzenegger shows no sign of finding a solution to his state’s fiscal mess.

One group that has an idea is the Marijuana Policy Project, a national pro-cannabis group that has started running a new television advertisement across California. It features Nadene Herndon, a middle-aged woman from suburban Sacramento County, discussing the impact of the state’s budget cuts.

“Huge cuts to police, schools and healthcare are inevitable, due to California’s budget crisis,” she says. “Even our state parks could be closed, but the governor and legislature are ignoring millions of Californians who want to pay taxes. We’re marijuana users.

“Instead of being treated like criminals for using a substance safer than alcohol, we want to pay our fair share.”

Some television stations have refused to broadcast the advertisement on the grounds that it promotes drug use. The campaign dovetails, however, with a move by San Francisco assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who this year introduced a Bill that would regulate marijuana in the same way as alcohol.

Marijuana is already widely available in California, not least on account of a 1996 statewide referendum that approved its use for medicinal purposes.

A doctor’s note stating that the bearer suffers from insomnia or anxiety is enough to satisfy one of the state’s numerous medical marijuana dispensaries, where the drug is grown and sold on the premises.

San Francisco has about 30 dispensaries but Los Angeles has a staggering 800, more than 600 of which opened with limited paperwork or permits in the past two years, due to a loophole in a city ordinance. The city now wants to close most of the dispensaries following complaints from neighbourhood groups about the patients’ raucous behaviour.

Buying and selling marijuana remains a federal crime but Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, has vowed not to prosecute anyone who is operating within the laws of their own state.

Schwarzenegger said in May that it was time for California to study whether to legalise and tax marijuana for recreational use, although he struck a cautious note on the issue this week.

“I’m a strong believer, when it comes to marijuana, that the current laws ought to stay in place,” he said.

“But I also said that I’m always interested in having dialogue about new ideas. And so that’s where I am still today.

“I think that we must protect the current laws and I don’t think that we ought to go and, because we could make a few dollars, that we ought to change the law just because of financial reasons.”

Advocates of legalisation claim that taxing marijuana could earn California at least $1.4 billion a year – enough to employ 20,000 teachers.

A rethink of America’s approach to drugs could save the country billions of dollars now spent attempting to interdict drugs crossing the Mexican border.

More importantly, it could help to reduce the country’s ever- growing prison population which is, at more than two million, the biggest in the world.