Study Says Taxing Weed Could Make the UK Billions in Taxes

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Hey guys, guess what? Turns out that making an extremely sought-after commodity legal on the UK market—therefore creating new businesses and jobs around that commodity—would lead to billions of dollars in tax revenue! Why haven't we thought of this before?

A study carried out by an assortment of scientists, academics, and police has found that not only will legalizing cannabis raise a huge amount of tax money, pumping money into an economy that very much needs it, but also reduce harm among users.

"Drug policy to date has (almost) always been driven by political and ideological agendas that have ignored scientific, public health, and social policy norms," the report states. "We are fully aware of the health harms associated with cannabis use, but contend that a rational policy must pragmatically manage the reality of use as it currently exists, rather than attempt to eradicate it using punitive enforcement."

On the panel was Professor David Nutt, an ex-advisor to the government on drug policy, who once famously stated that horse riding was more dangerous than ecstasy. He was later fired by the government after stating that ecstasy and LSD are less dangerous than alcohol.

We at VICE came to a similar conclusion as the team behind the study almost two years ago, working out that regulation and taxation would lead to an estimated saving of $1.1 billion to British taxpayers every year, with an approximate total of $3.4 billion made in tax revenue every year from sales alone.

In Colorado, a year after weed was fully legalized, police said they hadn't noticed "much of a change of anything," with a report noting that the state had collected $59.8 million in tax revenue from sales of the drug, while incidents of impaired driving, property crime, violent crime, and teen drug use had all fallen.

Why the British government has always refused to listen to the specialists saying they're getting drug policy wrong—or pay any attention to successes in other countries—is beyond us. But hey, there you go: Here's another well-researched, unbiased, hugely profitable piece of expert advice to completely disregard.