Beginning in 2017, high school graduates in a Colorado county will be able to apply for a college scholarship funded by a marijuana tax.
Voters in Pueblo County approved a measure that would incrementally increase taxes on marijuana by 5 percent over the next five years in order to fund college scholarships and other community improvement projects. Funding education via a tax on a recreational drug is something Time called “a concept that probably would have been laughed off as a total joke just a few years ago.”
County officials believe this measure is the first of its nature and are hopeful that this program will allow more families in their community send their children to school.
Colorado voted to legalize marijuana in 2012 and public sale of the drug began on January 1, 2014. Since then, crime rates have fallen and the industry has boomed, generating $63 million in tax revenue and an additional $13 million in licenses and fees. This scholarship is an additional positive outcome for the pro-legalization camp, showing that the legal sale of weed can be beneficial for the community as a whole. Legalization has not caused the state to fall into moral disarray, as many of its opponents feared. That being said, the tendency to turn this issue into a moral struggle between vapid, lazy potheads and hardheaded conservatives clinging to their principles is an oversimplification by either party.
The legalization of marijuana is an issue that runs much deeper than some bearded white guy lighting up at a festival. Nationwide, marijuana arrests make up about half of all drug arrests. The American Civil Liberties Union estimates that the cost of enforcing marijuana laws sits at about $3.6 billion (as of 2013). According to another report by the ACLU, people of color are 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people, despite similar usage rates.
Even in Colorado, where arrest rates for marijuana “plummeted” after legalization, there are still racial disparities in the number of arrests made. Legalization is not a perfect solution for racial policing problems that started even before the war on drugs did, but it is a good first step. And using the money from legalization to fund education is an even better second step.
You may have heard of something called the school-to-prison pipeline, an explanation of the policies that create an environment where schoolchildren — particularly those from disadvantaged areas — are pushed into the criminal justice system. The pipeline consists of a variety of problems, including the use of “school resource officers,” or police officers patrolling the hallways who have little to no experience with youth (you will recall the recent video of a girl being thrown from her desk by an officer).
Again, the school-to-prison pipeline is a problem that legalization of marijuana won’t fix on its own. But if we funneled legalization taxes into the public education system, it could help fix overcrowding and insufficient resources for “extra” benefits like counselors and certain programs — including the arts — that help keep kids in school. According to a study by Northeastern University, high school dropouts are 63 times more likely to go to prison than college graduates.
Since legalization, Colorado has improved not only in one county’s college scholarship program, but in their broader education system, earmarking $13.6 million in taxes in the first five months of 2015 for school construction projects. In Education Week’s annual ranking of public schools, Colorado climbed from 35th in the nation in 2012 to 21st in 2015. Improvements could still be made, but the state is on the climb.
The education system and the prison system are structures in the United States that need a major overhaul. The kind of extreme reform needed goes beyond anything the legalization of marijuana can do on its own, but improvements can be made one step at a time. Since the issues all interplay in some way, marijuana legalization is a good first breach into a broken system. If we look at the benefits of legalization in a broader spectrum than just stoners vying for civil liberties, we see the potential for improvement in areas that desperately need it.
