Some Surprising Marijuana Facts

Marijuana is one of the most controversial topics in the United States. There are many speculations as to what will happen when cannabis is legalized. Some people think that the marginal social cost will outweigh the marginal social benefit while others think the opposite. However, no matter what people believe, there are facts that cannot be avoided. Here are some facts on cannabis that may surprise you:

Firstly, in Colorado, legal sales of the cannabis industry grew to almost $1 billion during 2015. Cannabis is much more lucrative than people believe.  There are many people, as previously mentioned, concerned about the negative externalities. However, two of the positive externalities are jobs and tax revenue. Recently, a report from NerdWallet said that marijuana, if legalized throughout the entire country, would generate more than $3 billion in tax revenue per year.

Secondly, there are about 700,000 people incarcerated per year because of cannabis related charges. Obviously, there are many dangerous people in the cannabis world such as cartels. However, eighty-eight percent of people arrested in 2014 for marijuana were just arrested for having small amounts of marijuana. In fact, forty percent of all drug arrests were for possessing small amounts of marijuana. This takes up a ton of space in the criminal justice system and ruins lives that don’t deserve to be ruined.

The final fact, which may be the most surprising, is that the first online sale was a cannabis sale. This is according to John Markoff in his book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. He states that in 1971 or 1972, Stanford students used Arpanet accounts at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory that were involved in commercial transactions with Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This was before Amazon or eBay existed, and it turns out that the students decided to sell an unknown amount of cannabis.