This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 8th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Illinois gets a lot of things wrong, spending, taxes, the basic organization of Chicago's government, but Cannabis offered an opportunity

to get something right, legalize a plant for adult use.

Adam Schuster of the Illinois Policy Institute says, well, it's really starting to look like Illinois managed to

mess that up too. We spoke last month in Chicago. Since 2010 more than a

dozen states how many states have legalized pot for recreational purposes?

I think it's a dozen. You know, in my study I looked at states with mature markets so they'd done it for two years or more I think it was nine.

Okay well above half of the population of the United States of America lives in a

legal cannabis regime for for one reason or other either medical or recreational.

Illinois, notably the second state to legalize cannabis legislatively rather than through an act of the people.

How's it going?

Well, I think the summary is that Illinois has overtaxed and over-regulated its legal marijuana market

to the extent that they're actually undermining many of the goals of legalization, including

to raise tax revenue

and we're raising hundreds of millions of dollars

less than we could because of our high taxes

and restrictive licensing regime,

as well as to eliminate the black market and the crime associated with it

because when you sort of freeze people out of the legal market but you've already

lowered the consequences of possession and use you drive people to the black market.

You and I spoke before we started recording on this topic and we agreed basically that Colorado they did it there they did it first in a real sense because they

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