Bill Decker: Is marijuana the new gambling?

The rest of the nation is wrestling with these questions: Should marijuana remain forever banned, consigned to the same legal purgatory as cocaine and heroin? Should the infirm be allowed to take comfort from marijuana’s medicinal benefits? And should the neighborhood stoner be allowed to catch a legal buzz just because “Benny Hill” is coming on?
But that’s the rest of the nation. Louisiana’s peculiar history forces us to ask another, tougher question: Will our current state budget troubles make the potential tax revenue from legalized marijuana so enticing that the Legislature will decide to grab it without due consideration of the consequences?
It wasn’t so long ago that the Legislature did just that, only with another allegedly victimless vice: gambling.
Think back to the end of the 1980s. A long period of slumping oil prices had ravaged the state government revenue stream for most of a decade. And because the state constitution imposes a series of revenue dedications, much of the budget-cutting had to be done in the areas of health care, higher education and law enforcement.
Charity hospitals nearly lost the accreditation for their residency programs, which train the doctors who will treat Louisiana in the future. Campuses deferred important maintenance and lost student and faculty brainpower. State police troops were closed or consolidated.
Some of those problems may sound familiar. They’re the same obstacles the Legislature is trying to overcome in the current session, when lawmakers learned they have a $1.6 billion hole to fill before they can balance the budget.
The solution for at least part of that earlier budgetary tangle was to open Louisiana to legal gambling, even though opposition popped up nearly everywhere.
It’s not like we hadn’t had our problems before. The federal and state governments, led by then-Gov. Murphy Foster, joined forces to kill a notoriously corrupt lottery run by a New York corporation in Louisiana in 1893.
If you poke around in the online records of the 1950s Kefauver anti-Mafia hearings, you’ll find testimony by New Iberia attorney Warren “Puggy” Moity. He described how slot machines had infiltrated Louisiana, bringing corruption with them.
But horse racing has long been legal in Louisiana. Momentum began building for Indian reservation casinos in the 1970s and culminated in the federal Indian Gaming Regulation Act of 1988, which established the regulatory framework.
Louisiana instituted a state lottery in 1991. Riverboat gaming was legalized and rewarded with copious exemptions from the requirement that they move away from their docks. New Orleans was granted a land-based casino. By 1991, video poker was legal, too, and available in many restaurants and bars with no other connection to gaming. The video poker truck stop was born.
Individual parishes were later allowed to opt out of video poker and riverboats. One that booted gambling was Lafayette. In response, Evangeline Downs, looking for more revenue, moved to gambling-friendly St. Landry Parish, where the track could offer slot machines as well as wagering on the ponies.
In other words, all bets were off. Or rather, on.
Legislators were among those who tried to warn the state that too much gambling was happening too fast.
Some of the claims of gambling opponents were just silly, like the survey that indicated 5 percent of Louisiana’s people are problem gamblers.
Other misgivings weren’t so silly. The New York Times reported that even before video poker became technically legal in Louisiana, the FBI picked up signs that the Gambino and Genovese mobs, two of the infamous five Mafia families of New York, were jockeying for a piece of the video poker action here. Eventually, at least 25 people, including state Rep. B.J. “Buster” Guzzardo of Independence, pleaded guilty or were convicted.
The most unsightly stain, of course, was the conviction of former Gov. Edwin Edwards in 2001 on racketeering charges related to the issuance of riverboat permits.
So why so much gambling so fast?
Money.
State gaming revenues in fiscal 2014, according to the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, amounted to $852 million in Louisiana alone. Only about $6 million came from pari-mutuel betting, the gambling we had before gambling exploded.
That’s richer than the take is likely to be from legalized marijuana, although there’s a lot of variation in the dope numbers.
In 2008, the libertarian Cato Institute figured that if legal marijuana were to be taxed the way we tax alcohol and cigarettes now, Louisiana would probably make $42 million a year. The kicker is that by legalizing marijuana, we’d also do away with $91 million in spending on marijuana law enforcement.
Cato actually may be low-balling legal marijuana. In Washington, one of the states that has legalized marijuana, the state government estimated that marijuana taxation would bring in $533 million a year to the state government alone by fiscal 2015.
That doesn’t count another $34 million in local government revenue, nor does it include any law enforcement savings.
Washington figured it would have to spend $16 million a year to train state troopers to look for people driving under the influence of marijuana, to inspect and license marijuana-selling premises, and the like. Even so, the state is counting on half a billion in new revenue, quicker than you can say “Cheech and Chong.”
Too quickly, maybe.
Do we know for sure that marijuana doesn’t act as a gateway drug?
Are we sure users of legal marijuana will be happy to go no further than legal marijuana?
Does a state that struggles to control drunken driving need to start serving dope on every corner? What effect does marijuana have on the adult brain? The adolescent brain? The child’s brain? Don’t think age limits on the purchase of marijuana will work any better for weed than for alcohol.
So far, only medical marijuana, which has been theoretically legal in Louisiana for years, is making much headway in the Legislature this session.
But it’s worth remembering that gambling was once a long-shot cure-all for our state budget. And yet 25 years later, here we are, with legalized gambling – and another strained budget.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Morgan City Daily Review. Reach him at bdecker@daily-review.com.