Vancouver, British Columbia: Marijuana cultivation and use in Canada is so widespread that Parliament ought to tax and regulate it like any other legal product, concludes a study released Wednesday by The Fraser Institute, an independent economic think-tank in Vancouver.
The study’s author – Stephen Easton, an economics professor at Simon Fraser University – estimates that taxing marijuana would generate an additional $2 billion per year in federal revenues.
“Marijuana is too easily produced and exported to be controlled with the tools available to law enforcement in a free society,” he writes. “The return on investment is sufficiently great so that for each marijuana growing operation demolished, another takes its place. … As a consequence, the broader social question becomes less about whether we approve or disapprove of local [marijuana] production, but rather who shall enjoy the spoils. As it stands now, growers and distributors pay some of the costs and reap all of the benefits of the multi-billion dollar marijuana industry, while the non-marijuana smoking taxpayer sees only the costs.”
The study estimates that there are as many as 17,500 marijuana grow operations in British Columbia alone.
“Unless we wish to continue the transfer of these billions from this lucrative endeavor to organized crime, the current policy of prohibition should be changed,” Easton concluded. “Not only would we deprive some very unsavory groups of a profound source of easy money, but also resources currently spent on marijuana enforcement would be available for other activities.”
For more information, please contact Allen St. Pierre, Executive Director of the NORML Foundation, at (202) 483-5500. Full text of the study is available online at:
http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/admin/books/files/Marijuana.pdf