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Medical Marijuana has been legal in California for 20 years.
STATES CHRONICLE – $3.1 billion is what the United States would earn in 2016 from sales tax revenue if medical marijuana would be legalized nationwide. Revenue comes from much more than sales taxes, it also comes from licensing fees. Medical marijuana growers, processors, businesses all require permits.
As of now, medical marijuana sales for 2016 will be estimated to sum up close to $6.7 billion. In 2020, this number will go higher than $22 billion. In less than five years, if nothing changes in the world of medical marijuana, sales will triple.
If it were legalized, the economic boom would be exponentially proportionate. The marijuana industry has one of the highest growth potentials in the history of the United States. So why is marijuana not legalized?
Marijuana is not legalized because the federal government still regards it as a schedule 1 drug. A schedule 1 drug is considered to have no beneficial medical qualities. It is also deemed illicit.
Schedule 1 drugs also imply some nasty tax implications, as all business need to pay taxes on gross profits and not net profits.
And if that in itself does not stop any would-be cannabis entrepreneurs in their tracks, banking systems are also not allowed to work well with schedule 1 drugs. Business owners are not allowed to handle their economics through banking, due to cannabis being illicit.
Businesses have the highest difficulty in making and receiving payments in cash invariably. It requires additional accounting, supervising, and security. Also, without the aid of banking transactions, other businesses might find it too much of a hassle to cooperate.
In order to legally demonstrate that cannabis does, in fact, have beneficial medicinal qualities, researchers have been on the case. Currently, several studies prove cannabis can help with reducing the frequency of epilepsy seizures. Cannabis is also being shown to be beneficial, in a medical way, to people suffering from type 2 diabetes, ulcerative colitis, cancer, and those are just the afflictions most people know.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration wants marijuana to be rescheduled, and the Drug Enforcement Agency now finds itself in the position where they need to make a decision. In the couple of weeks to follow, the DEA will either keep marijuana as a schedule 1 drug, decide current medical research is relevant enough to move it, either to schedule 2 or anywhere else down to schedule 5.
The dream, of course, is that they unschedule it complete, in which case the United States has an overnight economic boom and everybody wanting to partake in legalized recreational marijuana can do so.
Image Courtesy of Pixabay.
