Many years ago, as the Grand Traverse Band was building the Turtle Creek casino in Williamsburg I had a friend that was pretty vocal with his opposition to a large scale gaming facility coming to our corner of the state. Within a few years though, my anti-gaming friend kind of changed his tune and stopped with the anti-casino carping. I asked him why he had changed his tune and he told me that an organization he volunteered with had just received a sizable grant from the tribes twice a year divvying up of the money they get from electronic games.
I couldn’t help thinking about my old friend last week when I read in the paper about the nearly million-dollar-payout coming to Grand Traverse county via the 10 percent recreational marijuana excise tax. As much as he had railed against the evils of gaming, I’m sure he had an equal amount of shade to throw at the legalization and use of marijuana. I have no idea how those funds will be distributed but I’m sure he would have appreciated being part of a local cause that was positively affected by them.
That’s how it often works though, right? People are against lots of things until they realize how its presence benefits them.
Like marijuana.
I smoked my first joint when I was in college in 1978 and yes, I knew it was illegal. In conjunction with that moment, I recall conversations amongst users about its impending legalization. Stupid college kids that we were, we figured its legalization and the tax revenue it would raise were just a matter of time. None of us thought that we would measure that “matter of time” in 50-year increments, but that’s how it played out with recreational weed being legalized in 2018. I smoked pot for a few years after college too, but my circle of friends eventually evolved into a group that didn’t use it until it became legal.
So the $973,000 that Grand Traverse County will have to divide up comes with a bit of work.
The gambling funds that come from the electronic games gets split up by members of the Grand Traverse Band. I like that because they’re the ones that collect it, there is an application and vetting process that they employ, and it’s always interesting reading to find out where their money is being spent.
Who will be splitting the recreational marijuana tax that local governments will be getting remains to be seen. I know this, those of us that shop local dispensaries probably won’t be asked to review applications or be part of any vetting process. I mean, it is nearly $1 million so my guess is that there will be a few people involved in the process that have consumed local legal marijuana, but probably not all.
I’m confident there will be those from among the many that have found life to be less edgy, less triggered, less nauseating, easier to sleep, and just plain better thanks to the occasional toke or edible. I’m just as confident there will be folks making decisions about it that strongly disagree with its modern presence.
I’m equally confident, in an ironic way, that the same government that spent decades and dollars discouraging the use and prosecuting the users now will have a hand in distributing this new source of funding.
Of all life’s ironies, always among my favorites is that we may not all love the same things, but when the money is right, people find things they dislike to be okay.