That was my point. Say an average smoker of tobacco smokes 1/2 pack a day (maybe more), the average pot smoker probably doesn't smoke ten joints a day, so the volume of marijuana sold would be lower than than tobacco. I imagine that most people who smoke the herb are casual users, not consuming at the level of tobacco smokers. Besides I used to be really involved in pot culture, and there is nothing a pothead loves more than his babies (plants). I just think the people would use on a daily basis (say more than 2 grams a day) would grow it. This is all from personal experience, because Marihuana is so easy to grow, doesn't need to be completely killed to harvest and yields a lot of smoking material from one plant.
I'm not arguing against legalization, I just don't think you would see tax revenues as high as there are with smoking and drinking. That is unless about half the population smoked weed like they do cigarettes.
Growing ones own tobacco takes too much work (in my opinion way more than marijuana).
"If you want to grow tobacco to make your own cigarettes or pipe tobacco, you should have an area at least 8 meters by 1 meter. This will be enough to grow approximately fifty tobacco plants, which will allow you to make about 5000 or more cigarettes. (But remember that smoking is hazardous to your heath and we do not recommend it!)" http://www.rusticgirls.com/gardening/growing-tobacco.html
16-25 cigarrettes a day 35.8% of smokers
http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/2k3/cigs/cigs.htm
5000/20 = 250 days of cigarettes from 50 tobacco plants.
I was going to get marijuana numbers, but I have to go.
I think that we should legalize marijuana, but pretending that it will somehow be this huge influx of tax revenenue is too idealistic. It will bring some revenue though(not even comparable to tobacco or alcohol though), not enough to wipe out the deficit though or anything like that. The biggest benefit is stopping the violence.
I'm not making any sense apparently.
Basically to make it worthwhile you'd have to get the same amount of pot smokers as tobacco smokers and have them spend the same as tobacco smokers would on a weekly basis. Say average smoker buys 50 dollars of cigarettes, you would need the average pot smoker to spend that much. Currently that's about an eighth of marijuana for that price. An eighth would probably last the majority at least a week. That's at street prices. Now if you wanted to lower prices, you must raise consumption to equal that or be greater than that if you want to take in serious revenue (at least what cigarettes take in). If the government could sell weed at the current prices, then yeah it would make a shitload, but cheaper than that, I doubt it would bring in that much.
That was my point if I ever had one.
"Calculating the total amount of marijuana available in a given year based on the amount seized during that year necessarily provides only a rough estimate. If only 10 percent of illicit drugs are seized in any given year, then, based on the figure of 2,412,365 pounds of marijuana seized in 2002, one could estimate that in 2002 the total amount of marijuana that traffickers succeeded in smuggling into the country was roughly 24 million pounds," - I just chose the highest consumption estimate for marijuana http://www.drugscience.org/Archive/bcr4/5Supply.html
Now tobacco
"Since farmers grow tobacco, they likely are more interested in the consumption of cigarette tobacco than of cigarettes. From a peak of 1.17 billion pounds (processing weight) in 1963, U.S. annual cigarette tobacco consumption has declined to 747 million pounds in 2001" http://www.nationalaglawcenter.org/assets/crs/RL30947.pdf Tax would need to be really large on marijuana to make up for the smaller volume (so would price for the company to make a good profit) I'm done
