Government study says legalising cannabis would raise millions in tax

Last Updated: October 13, 2015By

Legalising cannabis could save £200m in court and police costs and raise hundreds of millions of pounds in tax each year, a leaked government study has revealed.

The Treasury study – which was passed to the BBC’s Newsnight programme – was commissioned by the Liberal Democrats in coalition earlier this year, but was never published.

The study – which was set up to examine the “potential fiscal impacts of introducing a regulated cannabis market in the UK” – states that 216 tonnes of cannabis was smoked in the UK in the past year and that 2.2 million people aged 16 to 59 are thought to have used the drug in that time.

Government analysts judged that a study from the Institute for Social and Economic Research, which concluded that licensing cannabis could raise up to £1.25bn a year, was probably an overestimate.

But the Treasury report concludes that legalising and regulating the cannabis market would “generate notable tax revenue”, as well saving the state up to £200m in court and police costs a year.

Source: Legalising cannabis would raise millions in tax, says government study | Society | The Guardian

And how much money would be saved because fewer people would be sent to jail?

Or are we not supposed to discuss that because the Tories have been busy building huge new prisons, to be run by privateers?

It seems clear, from the numbers mentioned in this article, that once again the Conservative Government is profligately splashing out public money on all the wrong things, while wasting opportunities to collect revenue.

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5 Comments

  1. Bill Kruse October 13, 2015 at 11:34 am - Reply

    One wonders how much funding they get from the booze industry. Cheers!

  2. AndyH October 13, 2015 at 11:40 am - Reply

    I’ve analysed the government’s nonsense in my own blog: https://andrewhennager.wordpress.com/2015/10/13/what-the-real-reason-the-government-wont-legalise-cannabis/

    I’m curious to know what the real reason is – their claims simply do not add up.

  3. marcusdemowbray October 13, 2015 at 11:48 am - Reply

    “while wasting opportunities to collect revenue.” Indeed! Yesterday it was announced that last year Facebook paid only £4,300 in Corporation Tax ! The fair amount should probably be in the £millions. In 2012 at about the time of the Olympics, when the Tax Avoidance scandal really made it into the mainstream headlines, CaMoron and Gidiot both publicly promised immediate action to close the loopholes.

    Since then they have concentrated WHOLLY on Slash, Cut and Burn policies against the poorest and neediest and done nothing at all to make wealthy individuals and corporations pay a fair and reasonable amount of tax.

    Even if these people and corporations only paid HALF of what is fair and due, there would be NO NEED for all the cuts already done and those in the pipeline.

  4. Tom Speed October 13, 2015 at 12:06 pm - Reply

    ‘Raw Cannabis advantages – William Courtney MD.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlsBGXNxJYU

    W.C :(2:29) “Cannabis is the poster-child for raw food. Eaten raw in any ways, salad, blended, juiced, as long as it’s unheated, it has phenomenal properties, and then when you heat it some of those properties are deteriorated, and some of them are altered, and then the really big one is the creation of THC which is so potent at a very low dose that it restricts comfortable use to the 10 – 15mg which is really inadequate for many of the other functions of the plant, so there’s many things that happen when you heat it.

    But as you mentioned, we’ve been doing that for about 10,000 years and even in California 99.99% of people equate Cannabis with psychoactive use, so that is just a common misnomer and it is very difficult for me to hear speakers and people say Cannabis and THC and use those interchangeably because there is so little THC in the plant that you can not get high from eating it, it’s there but it’s there in trace amounts, it requires heating to convert the THC-Acid which is NON-psychoactive, into the THC which is very VERY psychoactive.”

    http://www.faqs.org/patents/assignee/gw-pharma-limited/

  5. Thomas October 13, 2015 at 2:27 pm - Reply

    I would never take Cannabis even if it were totally legal-but I’m favour if legalizing it with the same sort of rules as exist for knives and swords-legal in private, illegal in public. If people just smoke it privately, I don’t see the problem with it. But I don’t want people smoking it in the street and poisoning me with their fumes. Let them buy it in public, but not smoke it in public.

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