The Australian Sex Party has announced a radical economic plan that would see millions of dollars injected into the ailing Tasmanian economy.
Sex Party President, Fiona Patten, announced the Sex Party’s policy of making Tasmania the nation’s production hub for legal cannabis, on Nine’s national morning show.
The Sex Party wants to legalise and tax marijuana like alcohol and commence large-scale cultivation of cannabis crops alongside poppy crops in Tasmania and turn the state into the hemp and marijuana capital of Australia.
She said two states in the USA had now regulated and taxed recreational marijuana with Colorado being the latest. A further ten states are drawing up plans to do the same. Twenty one states in the US have legalised medical marijuana. New Zealand has recently regulated and taxed the sale of synthetic cannabis.
She said that the Sex Party’s fully-costed plan would add an immediate $53 million per annum to Tasmania in direct taxation revenue. “Tasmania spends $88 million a year on prohibition of drugs with a little more than half of this being spent policing marijuana in particular. This could all be freed up for general revenue”, she said. “All up, the regulation and taxation of marijuana in Tasmania, could contribute around $100 million to the state’s coffers”.
She said that for all the same reasons that made Tasmania the ideal place to grow poppies for high strength prescription drugs, growing marijuana for medical and recreational use made perfect sense. “Tasmania needs to work with a federal government to get behind the industrial hemp industry in Tasmania as well and make the entire hemp/marijuana industry in Tasmania into a multi-billion dollar one”, she said.
The Australia-wide market for recreational marijuana is estimated to be $6 billion per year and if trends in the US wash over to Australia, the medical marihuana market would rapidly grow into $1 billion industry.
“Australian drug policy is led by US drug policy and the writing is on the wall”, she said. “Within three years, marijuana and medical marijuana will be legal in most states in the US. When Australian laws change to meet the demands of a new generation, Tasmania needs to be in the vanguard of that movement and position itself to create some large revenues streams from it. If it misses out it will be a wasted opportunity.”
Background
Figures provided by Australian cannabis researcher, Dr John Jiggens, corroborated by early government figures from taxing and regulating marijuana in Colorado USA using formulaes from United Nations Office on Drug and Crime and further corroborated by National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre.
There are an estimated two million users of marijuana across Australia with 10.5% of all Australians have tried it in past year – (NDSHS: 2010)
This translates into 250,000 daily consumers who use an estimated 150 – 300 tonnes of cannabis per year. At an average cost of $20 per gram, this gives Australia a $6 billion per year industry.
National Revenue:
10% GST = $600 million.
30% excise tax (similar level to alcohol) = $1.8 billion
TOTAL = $2.4 billion
The estimated costs to Australian society of all (aggregated) illicit drugs is $8.1 billion (2004/05 – Costs) of which around half is lost on policing prohibition. The health costs to Australian society of ALL (aggregated) illicit drugs is estimated to be around $201 million.
Applying the formulaes to calculate usage patterns contained in the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime, 2006 Bulletin on Narcotics, Review of the World Cannabis Situation, page 48, they estimate frequency of consumption by users ranged from a low of 18 percent consuming once a year to 3 percent consuming daily. Applying this consumption pattern to an estimated 1,165,000 Australian marijuana users, and assuming only two grams of marijuana per use, the number of grams consumed annually is estimated at 273,171,000 grams. Assuming a fully functioning marijuana market and an average price of $25 per gram for fine grade marijuana, estimated total marijuana sales could be $6,829,275,000 annually. Taxed at 30%, (the same rate being proposed by the Colorado State government), this could easily raise over $2 billion a year in extra government revenue ($2,048,782,500).
Whilst the director of the National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre estimates that 750,000 Australians use cannabis every week, and approximately 300,000 smoke it on a daily basis (Source)
The 2007 National Drug Strategy Household Survey published in April 2008 by The Australian Institute of Health demonstrated that “Cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug in Australia, with a reported one-third of all Australians aged 14 or older (33.5%, about 5.8 million) having tried cannabis and 1.6 million using it in the past year” (Wikipedia Article: ‘Cannabis in Australia’)
The social cost of alcohol consumption in the 2004–05 financial year was estimated at $15.3 billion, second to the cost of tobacco and almost double the cost of illicit drugs ($8.2 billion).4 Alcohol-related harm accounted for 3.2% of the total burden of disease and injury in Australia in 2003, equating to 3430 deaths and 85 435 disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs).5 https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2010/192/8/cost-effectiveness-volumetric-alcohol-taxation-australia
Fiona Patten, Robbie Swan www.sexparty.org.au
