Weed for Everyone Over the past 25 years, the support for legalizing recreational marijuana has steadily increased to over fifty percent of the population, and it continues to increase (Aleem). The issue of legalizing recreational marijuana has been a controversy for the last few years. Although eight states, including the District of Columbia, have legalized recreational marijuana, it is still federally illegal. This means that the state is going around federal laws allowing marijuana to be used recreationally; a person can still get in trouble for having weed in Colorado because it is federally illegal and federal laws overpower state laws. In Colorado’s case, the federal government basically ignored them legalizing cannabis so they could see the effects it would have on the state, whether it be positive or negative. The legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado has had many positive and also …show more content…
According to Katie Lobosco, a CNN journalist, in the first year that Colorado sold recreational weed, they brought in a tax revenue of $53 million dollars. Although this sounds like a lot of money, they were expecting a higher amount. One reason economists thought that the total amount of money would be higher is because they thought that people would stop buying illegal pot and buy legal pot, but since the cost of legal pot is higher than illegal pot due to taxes and fees, they overestimated the amount of money they would make selling the legal marijuana. They also assumed that the people using medical marijuana would switch to recreational marijuana as well, and they did not. The tax on medical marijuana is much less than the tax on recreational marijuana because they are both taxed 2.9% but recreational marijuana is the 2.9% plus any additional state tax, also from Lobosco’s journal “Recreational Pot Delivers $53 Million in Tax Revenue to