It's time for Delaware to legalize and tax marijuana | Opinion
Delaware residents who enjoy consuming marijuana don’t have to look hard to find it. The illegal market offers plenty of weed dealers, and for those who prefer a more legitimate option, New Jersey dispensaries are just a short trip across the Delaware Memorial Bridge. Despite its illegal status, marijuana is already available in our communities. According to the 2019 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, nearly 1 in 5 American adults claimed to have used marijuana in the past year.
If the goal of continuing these archaic policies is to restrict access to marijuana, it is not working. Even worse, these policies exacerbate racial inequities in our criminal justice system and in our economy. Prohibition is a public policy failure. It’s time to legalize, regulate and tax marijuana like alcohol.
Delaware decriminalized small amounts of marijuana in 2015, but Delawareans, and disproportionately Black Delawareans, continue to be arrested for marijuana possession. According to an ACLU report of arrest data from 2018, Black Delawareans were more than four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white Delawareans even though marijuana usage rates are roughly the same among these two groups.
A better way forward requires that we treat drug abuse with public health solutions rather than criminal justice penalties. That's why over the past five years, we have expanded New Castle County's Hero Help program, which provides drug and alcohol addiction treatment as an alternative to arrest. Marijuana legalization could help free up public safety resources and provide much-needed revenue, enabling police departments to focus on addiction and mental health interventions through programs like Hero Help, which curb drug use far more effectively than arrests and criminalization.
As legalization advocates like to remind us, marijuana is the only industry that is begging to be taxed. Last year, legal marijuana sales generated more than $3.7 billion in tax revenue for 11 states. The proceeds were used to fund schools in Colorado, health insurance for low-income families in Washington, mental health and drug treatment in Oregon, reentry programs for the formerly incarcerated in Alaska, public transportation and local governments in Massachusetts, conservation efforts in Montana and many more worthy programs. Every year that we fail to legalize, regulate and tax marijuana is another year that we deprive Delawareans of additional funding for these types of valuable programs.
And while there certainly are health risks associated with marijuana use, the hyperbolic, reefer madness claims about marijuana have been proven false. Visit any legal state and you will find that their societies have not devolved into anarchy, as some alarmists warn.
However, we must be honest about the effects of marijuana. As with alcohol and tobacco, marijuana is not without potential consequences. Chronic marijuana use can stunt brain development in younger users, which is why it is important that we dissuade teenagers from using it. Our current policies, which have created an illegal market, are not an effective strategy. Dispensaries check IDs. Drug dealers don't. We should make it a priority to reduce teenage drug and alcohol abuse and adopt practices from the successful campaign to reduce cigarette usage among teenagers over the past two decades.
Workplace safety is another area that deserves our attention. Individuals should not operate heavy machinery under the influence of any drug and employers have legitimate interests in maintaining an alcohol and drug-free workplace. While any employer can still use drug tests to ensure a drug-free workplace, it likely will take additional technology and policymaking for marijuana to be treated as alcohol is on the job, prohibiting work for anyone actively impaired but permitting work for anyone who comes to work sober.
Opponents have raised questions about the economic impacts of recreational use. Those concerns pale in comparison to economic harms caused by prohibition. Young people who are arrested for marijuana have seen educational and career opportunities slip away because of their criminal records. Parents arrested for marijuana lose their jobs and can’t support their families. Violent drug distributors and dealers are provided with an enormous revenue source that helps them terrorize neighborhoods and destroy the quality of life in our state’s poorest communities. Ending prohibition enables us to undo some of the damage done by these harmful policies.
Rep. Ed Osienski and Sen. Trey Paradee deserve praise for including social equity licenses in House Bill 372, which would enable those who have been most negatively impacted by the war on drugs to benefit as business owners in Delaware's new marijuana industry. Their legislation also creates the Justice Reinvestment Fund, which would fund restorative justice programs, address underlying causes of crime, reduce the prison population and expunge criminal records. Social Equity Licenses and the Justice Reinvestment Fund would drastically improve the economic futures of hundreds of Delawareans and their families.
I join the more than 60% of Delawareans who support marijuana legalization, regulation and taxation. I encourage legislators to overturn the veto on HB 371, to legalize marijuana, and pass HB 372, to regulate and tax it. If they do, we will finally end marijuana prohibition and take important steps to repair our communities from the disastrous war on drugs.
Matt Meyer, New Castle County executive
This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: It's time for Delaware to legalize and tax marijuana
