Oklahoma, Nebraska Challenge Colorado Marijuana Legalization

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No one ever said it should be legal without the commerce portion being taxed, but why heavily? You didn't (and can't) supply an argument for HEAVY taxation. Heavy taxing won't keep the police off your back, because no amount of heavy taxing is going to make up for the loss of departments stealing money and product for people accused of running drugs.

Hahahahahaha, maybe. But if it's legalized coast to coast (in a similar fashion to Alcohol and Tobacco), the cops can't really do jack about it. Granted if you're hauling bails across the border from Mexico, you're going to have problems, but to the average joe pot smoker, there isn't shit they could do anymore.

Anyway my point being, my version of heavy taxation and others may be different.

Look at tobacco for instance, That's what I would consider HEAVY Taxation. CO has a state excise tax of 84 cents per pack of cigs or can of chew, then the feds tack on $1.01 for a grand total of roughly 37% on top of standard sales tax. IMO that's a HEAVY tax and IMO MJ shouldn't be regulated nor taxed any differently. Spirits are taxed in CO at a rate of $2.28 per gallon, beer at a rate of 8 cents per gallon wine at 32 cents per gallon. Those are all in addition to sales tax and federal excise taxes. Hell Gasoline is taxed at nearly 40 cents per gallon on average here between CO and Fed taxes (depends on price but that is 2014's average). IMO anything that's taxed above and beyond standard sales taxes assigned to regular items is HEAVILY taxed.

And as I've said before, why should MJ be exempt to these same taxes that are placed on Alcohol, tobacco, and Gasoline? NFA items hell, I just paid a $200 tax on top of sales tax for a suppressor that cost $450, That's a tax rate of 50.4%!!!!!

Now finally consider the amount of tax revenue from tobacco in CO, In 2011 the annual tax revenue was $200,594,000 I'm willing to bet that's a LOT more than the value of drug related seizures. see http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfa....cfm?Docid=403 (and notice the figures shown are thousands of dollars so multiply each number by 1000 to get the total $$ in tax revenue)

Now consider the projected numbers for CO Revenue from MJ this year at the current rate of 12.9% (less than half that of tobacco BTW) is $610 million, that makes up for a hell of a lot of cars, houses, cash, and other misc stuff being seized and sold at auction.