(Newswire.net — January 2, 2018) –As of 2018 the state of California became the world’s largest commercial market of recreational marijuana, generating billions in tax revenue, RT reports.
More than two decades have passed since authorities in California legalized medicinal marijuana. The first of January 2018 brought Californians a special gift – the legalization of recreational marijuana. America’s most populous state joins Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and Nevada to grant stores licenses for selling recreational marijuana.
Though for the federal government marijuana is still a controlled substance such as heroin or other narcotics, it is now legal to sell marijuana not only to those with special medicinal use licenses but to all customers who are 21 or older.
According to some speculations the state would profit at least one billion a year, from revenue taxes as more than one in five Americans is a marijuana user.
Authorities would wait and see the effect of legalizing recreational marijuana but if the high mood of residents doesn’t induce some overall negative effect on the community and boosts the tax income, other states might follow.
One of the main concerns is the possible increase of DUI, warns California’s Police Chief’s Association. “There’s going to be a public-health cost and a public-safety cost enforcing these new laws and regulations,” said Jonathan Feldman, a legislative advocate for the California Police Chief’s Association. He expressed a suspicion that the new marijuana law and the bad DUI statistic could financially “balance itself out“.
The legalization of recreational marijuana wouldn’t affect the black market as the price difference would be significant due to the applied taxes. According to the LA Times, the price of legal recreational marijuana could increase by 70%. Registered medicinal marijuana users, however, would be excluded from those taxes and could get unlimited quantities of weed.
Canada is anticipated to be the second country to extend ‘420’ [April 20, a day of cannabis consumption] to the whole year, as of July 2018 when marijuana stores would start selling recreational weed.