By Anna Song, KATU News and KATU.com Staff

If you just listen to just one side of the debate to legalize marijuana, you'd think it was a wonder plant.

A common argument is that marijuana is safer than the legal drug alcohol. But do facts back up that assertion?

“Marijuana is safer than alcohol,” Madeleine Martinez of Oregon’s pro-legalization organization NORML said, “no one's ever died of a lethal dose of marijuana.”

Mark Herer, owner of the The Third Eye Shoppe, a classic “head shop” located on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard in Portland, said he’s “met a lot of screwed up people in my day, I've met a lot of potheads in my day… most of the potheads I know are not screwed up people.”

Washington state lawmaker Mary Lou Dickerson, 63, is pushing for legalization and equates current marijuana laws to alcohol prohibition in the 1920’s.

“We're treating marijuana like we treated alcohol during prohibition, and it doesn't make sense,” she said.

Dickerson wants farmers licensed to raise marijuana and liquor stores to sell it with a 15 percent tax. Just like with alcohol she says, the tax money can offset the costs of addiction treatment - for all kinds of substances.

“Alcohol causes tremendous social costs in this state,” Dickerson added.

But opponents of legalization claim this thinking is naïve, since the numbers don't measure up.

By Anna Song KATU News and KATU.com Staff

PORTLAND, Ore. - While state budgets in Oregon and Washington face gaping holes, advocates of legalizing marijuana say taxing pot can help fill those holes.

Madeline Martinez, Oregon’s executive director for NORML, the national organization that’s pushing to reform marijuana laws, says she sees a golden opportunity to convince people that legalizing marijuana could be a good thing after all.

“Why don’t we capture the revenue that’s just being lost to the criminal market in many regards and bring it to the people. We’re the ones who deserve it,” she says.

Her group estimates the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act, if passed by voters, would generate $140 million a year in revenue, 90 percent of which would go to the state’s general fund. The rest would go primarily to drug abuse treatment programs, Martinez says.

She calls it “Cannicare” because “we would be using cannabis money to pay for health care,” she says.

With a $9 billion budget hole in the state of Washington, Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson, D-Seattle, proposed a law permitting the selling of pot at liquor stores with a 15 percent tax.

She says eventually about $300 million could be raised a year and “we could use every cent of that for drug and alcohol treatment and prevention.”

BY Oregon Tax News,

Pot appears to be back on the docket in 2010, as four states debate legalizing marijuana and the impacts such a move could have on businesses and the economy. Business owners are concerned that legalization will make them subject to new discriminatory lawsuits for not hiring workers who use marijuana. Some states however are hopeful that the legalization and the sale of marijuana will bring new tax revenue to the state during difficult economic times.

In Oregon, the Campaign for the Restoration and Regulation of Hemp (CRRH) and Oregon NORML have finished gathering the 1,000 sponsorship signatures needed for the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act 2010 (OCTA) to be placed on the ballot. The OCTA, would set aside two percent of the profits from the sale of cannabis in cannabis-only stores for two state commissions that promote industrial hemp biodiesel, fiber, protein and oil. The measure would legalize the sale, possession and personal private cultivation of marijuana.

People who want to cultivate and sell marijuana, or process commercial psychoactive cannabis, would be required to obtain a license from the state. Adults could grow their own marijuana and the sale of all cannabis strains’ seeds and starter plants with no license, fee or registration. Profits from the sale of pot would go to pay for state programs and drug treatment programs. Proponents argue that the proceeds would generate millions of dollars toward public finances.

California has also managed to collect enough signatures to place a petition on the ballot by next November. Advocates for legalizing marijuana in California argue that doing so, and taxing the drug, will generate much needed revenue for the cash strapped state,