Legalizing Pot Could Bust Prices by 80%

Another reason for California stoners to love Prop. 19
By Caroline Miller,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 8, 2010 9:46 AM CDT
Updated Jul 11, 2010 5:30 PM CDT
Legalizing Pot Could Bust Prices by 80%
FILE - In this Tuesday Jan. 26, 2010 picture, a pedestrian walks past a marijuana leaf neon sign advertising a medical marijuana provider along a street in the Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, Calif. Fourteen states have legalized medical marijuana, beginning with California in 1996, allowing chronically...   (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

Passage of California's Proposition 19, the ballot initiative to legalize marijuana, would cause the price of the choicest pot to plunge to $38 an ounce, the Rand Corp. estimates. Grateful stoners might also enjoy the irony that they could end up paying the government more for their weed than they pay to growers; taxes as high as $50 an ounce have been discussed as one of the drivers for legalization. That would put the grand total in the neighborhood of $88 an ounce, an 80% drop from a current high of about $450, notes the Los Angeles Times.

The Rand report, the work of five prominent drug policy experts, found it impossible to estimate the tax benefits, but it noted legalization in California would cause the price of pot to drop across the nation, stimulate "marijuana tourism" in the Golden State, and disrupt smuggling from Mexico. Oh, and consumption would surely rise—maybe 50%, maybe 100%. And that, one legalization enthusiast notes, would just return the level of consumption to where it was in the late '70s. (More Proposition 19 stories.)

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