The Marijuana Recommendation Blog

Moves are underway by the California state congress to start taxing marijuana and its use. While attempts at reviewing the number of Medical marijuana recommendations issued by licensed physicians are physically impossible because there is no monitoring of these Medical Marijuana recommendations and with no requirement to get a state or county marijuana card, there is no way to know how many recommendations have actually been issued.
It will cost about $100-$200 for your visit to the marijuana doctor. Current estimates now have up to 350,000 marijuana users in California with physician issuing Medical Marijuana recommendations, up from only 100,000 in 2005. Using simple math, that’s at least $100 million dollars in revenue added to the income of the marijuana doctor and that’s only on the personal income tax of the doctors alone!
Proponents of taxing marijuana say that as much as $14 billion dollars can be generated by this proposition. The same sentiments are also being aired by concerned marijuana supporters. Regulations and taxation is a much better way of resolving the increasing use of marijuana that are not with any medically serious illness.
Supporters also claims the fact the state government also saves on the operating cost of correctional facilities currently overcrowded with criminals being convicted off crimes that maybe addressed by just rehabilitating rather than incarceration.
From 1980 to 2000 California saw its inmate population increase 554% adding 137,391 newly convicted inmates for a total of 160,655 at the beginning of 2000. In twenty years California added 21 new facilities costing the state taxpayers billions in construction cost and billions in operations cost. Today the California Department of Corrections has an operating annual budget of 5.7 Billion dollars and a per inmate cost of $30,929. California now operates the third largest penal system in the world, second only to Chinas national correctional system and the United States national correctional system.

What fueled this massive increase in the inmate population is ten fold. California in the 1980’s and 1990’s created some of the harshest sentencing laws in the nation for virtually every offense imaginable. Invoking determinate sentencing guidelines and a new anti drug crusade California has the highest rate of drug offender incarcerations in the nation 134-per 100,000 people in the state. Today in the California Department of Corrections approximately 23,000 inmates are incarcerated solely for drug possession. This is the same amount of total inmates housed in California Prisons in the year 1980. With the passing of the 3 strikes law in the mid 1990’s California now has the largest number of inmates sentenced to life in prison of any state in the union.
By just taxing the medical marijuana recommendations to a minimum of $100 as state fee and using the reported number of only 100,000 medical marijuana recommendations issued for 2005, that will be equivalent to about $10 million in revenues which could be used to support over a 900,000 inmates at the various correctional facilities in the state of California.