Twelve billion dollars is an astounding amount of money.
This sum, if stacked up in one-dollar bills, reaches over 800 miles in height … a distance more than twice the east-west length of Pennsylvania.
Twelve billion dollars is an amount of money that never passed through PA state tax coffers because PA state legislators refused to approve a measure introduced in1983 by a State Senator from North Philadelphia to legalize and tax marijuana.
Then-State Senator Milton Street introduced that marijuana legalization/taxation measure to generate additional revenue for the state (then in a budget deficit crisis), to lower tax burdens on his North Philly constituents, and to recognize reality. Street said over a million PA residents consumed marijuana in 1983, irrespective of marijuana being illegal.
“We can either tax marijuana or raise other taxes. You can’t have it both ways. We don’t manufacture money in Pennsylvania,” Street told me during a March 1983 interview when I worked as a reporter for The Daily News.
The rejectionist mindset Street encountered 43 years ago remains active inside the state Capitol, especially in the State Senate where Milton Street once sat.
PA’s Republican-controlled Senate did not act on the legalization measure approved last year by the Democratic-controlled PA House. Ironically, a key state Senate proponent for legalization is Milton’s nephew, Sharif Street, who holds the same Senate seat his late uncle once occupied.
It’s time for PA legislators to transform their bad bet on marijuana prohibition into a tax revenue benefit through legalization.
Most Republican legislators in PA’s Capitol refuse to enact repeated requests from Governor Josh Shapiro to legalize and tax marijuana for adult use. Shapiro, like the Streets, recognizes reality: Pennsylvanians use “pot” — one synonym for marijuana. Legalization enjoys wide support among Pennsylvanians.
Shapiro stresses how some Pennsylvanians purchase marijuana in five states that border Pennsylvania where adult use marijuana is legal. Those purchases increase tax revenues in New Jersey, Delaware and those three other border states. (Marijuana for medical use is legalized in Pennsylvania yet those sales are exempt from state and local sales taxes.)
In 1983, Milton Street projected $277 million in new tax revenue annually from legalized marijuana. In 2018, a report released by PA’s then-Auditor General supportive of legalization, projected $580 million annually from taxing marijuana sales. Governor Shapiro’s latest budget projects $729.4 million in the first year of legalization from taxes and one-time licensing fees.
While Milton Street’s visionary 1983 taxation proposal outpaced public polling supportive of marijuana legalization, Street’s proposal did comport with numerous efforts to reform prohibition of marijuana.
A history of failing to act
In 1972, a presidentially-appointed commission recommended decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana. Then-President Richard Nixon rejected the recommendations of his appointed commission, chaired by a former conservative Republican governor of PA.
In 1975, the then-PA Governor’s Council on Drug and Alcohol Abuse recommended decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana.
An August 1975 editorial in The Philadelphia Inquirer endorsed that Council’s call for decriminalization under the headline “Pot isn’t a social menace.” That editorial stated “evidence” refuted claims that marijuana use led to hard drug use and criminal conduct. Incredibly, current opponents of legalization still embrace those two long debunked claims.
PA legislators rejected that Council’s decriminalization recommendation and then blew off a decriminalization bill introduced in 1978. That 1978 bill held support from the PA Bar Association, the PA Medical Society and many of PA’s District Attorneys. The author of that bill, a state legislator from my home community in Pittsburgh, sought to reduce expenditures for marijuana enforcement and reduce racially discriminatory marijuana enforcement practices.
“We can either tax marijuana or raise other taxes. You can’t have it both ways. We don’t manufacture money in Pennsylvania.” — late State Senator Milton Street
Law enforcement across PA expends millions annually arresting people mainly for simple possession of marijuana. That costly enforcement stains arrestees with burdensome criminal records. In 2014, Philadelphia decriminalized possession of marijuana.
The federal government’s 1937 ban on marijuana arose from a racism-tainted campaign launched by the then U.S. drug czar, an official born in Altoona, PA.
Before that federal ban, products containing marijuana were widely available. For example, a Philadelphia firm that made a marijuana product for curing “colds” advertised that product nationally in the late 1800s. Advertisements included The Inquirer and the newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a religious denomination founded in Philadelphia.
Opposition to marijuana legalization in PA’s Capitol mirrors resistance legislators once mounted against legalized gambling in PA and ending the state’s Blue Laws that barred all commerce on Sundays.
Casinos and Sunday retail sales each generate tax revenue for the state, as does the state-controlled sale of alcoholic beverages. It’s time for PA legislators to transform their bad bet on marijuana prohibition into a tax revenue benefit through legalization.
Linn Washington Jr. is a journalism professor at Temple University who has reported on and researched marijuana policy since the late 1970s. Washington co-created one of America’s first college courses to prepare journalism students to cover the rapidly expanding marijuana industry.
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