Sin taxes are suffering from a shortage of sinners

As an Oregonian, I wish I could see the benefits of it locally. We have at least a half dozen weed shops in my town, vastly outnumbering any other category of business, and yet my kids literally couldn't go to school one day last week because the district "doesn't have enough money to staff the buildings."

I know it's a bit of an unfair complaint, but these are the things I start wondering about when we can't even keep our schools open. Where is the money going?

You can look up the state budget here: https://www.oregonlegislature.gov/lfo/Pages/Publications.asp...

Your local municipality probably has some kind of budget transparency thing that you can look at and by comparing YoY expenditures you should be able to sus out where the money is going and where its coming from. Would be cool to have some kind of queryable dataset for this process tho

Maybe there isn't that much money in it? The stuff does "grow on trees" after all.

There might be lots of weed stores for the same reason antique stores and cigarette shops proliferate - they're cheap to set up.

As a Washingtonian - you guys just don't have that much money. Your income taxes are low.

Oregon weed tax revenue is mostly earmarked for addiction support spending, isn't it?

There's a ton of money in it. The arbitrage is that one farmer can produce hundreds of pounds of product but cannot possibly warehouse and sell it all themselves. The resulting wholesale prices make setting up a shop that charges retail prices an incredibly reliable way to make money.

There is no mechanism, as there is in food, to support farmers or to control consumer prices. There is also no government funded free marijuana program. It seems like it would have analogs, but marijuana is truly a unique market.