Can somebody please explain and/or justify the whole idea behind the Colorado "marijuana registry?"  You know - the distinction between medical and recreational marijuana use in terms of government control?  I want to know what it does, besides giving some small subset of users a not-so-special tax break?  I'm curious specifically about what benefit it holds for the people of this state - not the government agencies, doctors and other people running it.  We certainly need to keep them all employed, gainfully or otherwise. but...

What I see getting done is a small tax break to an even smaller subset of the population.  That is the only practical outcome I can imagine from this little experiment in government taxation.  That holds true only if the patient is spending quite a bit on the stuff.  The vast majority of your "registered" users are probably lucky to break even on the cost of their CO Medical Marijuana Card.  Kids will get it off the street like they always did.  Anyone else can walk into a dispensary for it.  Cannabis would be OTC at Walgreens by now if people had any sense.

Hearing praises from across the country gushing about all the Marijuana tax revenue makes me wonder.  It wouldn't be surprising to hear the cost of this system, to include staffing and maintenance exceeds the tax revenue suppressed by it.  Ironic how a costly government system exists to reduce tax revenue.  After all, it's just another database duplicating personal information freely available at numerous other places within the state of Colorado's data repositories, used simply to give people permission to buy something at a lower tax rate.  Don't kid yourself into believing there's much of any real medical assessment going into these so-called "evaluations."  The lion's share of other things I see it accomplishing is employing an army of quack doctors, their staff and the government entities supporting it.  Please tell me one other GOOD thing it does.

Dispensaries are forced to maintain dual operations, requiring more employees and other unnecessary considerations.  Add up the medical tax savings, then subtract the fees (doctor visit, notary, filing fee - more if including any prior diagnosis activities), and we find that in many cases a CO medical marijuana card ends up being more expensive than just paying the rec tax.  That is clearly obvious to anyone on the patient end who is even passively aware of their spending habits.  On the the government side, if suppressing tax revenue while generating highly dubious employment and related activities is what you are trying to do, consider yourselves successful!  OTOH, I view the claimed motive ostensibly supporting the welfare of medical marijuana users as nothing but a HUGE FAIL.

I can see how a heavily controlled fortress of certification and legally confusing mess of regulations might satisfy the skeptics in order to get the ball rolling 6 years ago.  But after my own 3 years of this government charade, I've concluded that my few dollars would be better spent in the tax pool than supporting this type of institutionalized waste.  Now I wonder how much longer the CO Marijuana Registry will go on absorbing funding that would be better spent almost anywhere else.  It's a beneficial plant for chrissakes - used by humans around the world for thousands of years with no problems whatsoever, until modern governments got involved.

v/r