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