Far more popular than any politician, cannabis legalization is still being sold to American voters on a wobbly raft of lofty and discursive promises, uneasily lashed together with sinews of money.
Several years into the experiment, cannabis is absolutely a multi-billion-dollar industry, but legal weed hasn’t fixed systemic racism, cured the ills of the drug war, or democratized business opportunities. Legalization hasn’t even guaranteed Americans reliable access to legal cannabis, in the states that have legalized.
But at least one promise has been kept: legalization has been great for cops.
You would not know it by listening to police complain about enforcing “drugged driving,” a task already on their plates, or lament obsolete K-9 drug-sniffing units, but legalization has been a literal windfall for American police, who in many states are guaranteed beneficiaries of cannabis taxes, a privilege not afforded to schools, healthcare, transportation, or other functions of the state.
In California, after all regulatory costs are paid for, 20 percent of cannabis taxes are set aside for law enforcement. In Oregon, the figure is 35 percent. Even cannabis taxes not earmarked for cops have ended up in police budgets—and, of course, any city or state’s “general fund,” into which most cannabis sales taxes are deposited, is also available to police. (In Canada, the affront is even more personal: former high-ranking cops became executives for cannabis companies.)