Approximately nine percent of adults reported consuming cannabis in some form at least once a month. Based on a survey about frequency of use, Light et al. estimate that the total marijuana demand in the state is 121.4 metric tons annually . According to their methodology, individuals that consume cannabis daily constitute about one-fifth of marijuana users, but about two-thirds of total demand. Results from this study, when considered in conjunction with tax data, present a paradox. If the demand for marijuana was previously underestimated, why have tax revenues associated with the new marketplace fallen short of expectations? One of many possible explanations is that many individuals continue to take advantage of the black or medical markets to avoid the taxes associated with higher-priced retail marijuana. Given the novelty of recreational marijuana legalization, substantial uncertainty existed regarding the economic benefits that would ensue. Taxes on recreational marijuana include a base sales tax of 2.9 percent, an additional 10 percent sales tax, and a 15 percent excise tax. By the end of 2014, recreational and medicinal marijuana sales totaled nearly $700 million , with about 45 percent of the total from retail sales. During the first month of recreational sales, few retail outlets were operational, and sales of medical marijuana were more than double the nearly $15 million in recreational marijuana sales. Recreational marijuana sales increased every month through August by an average of $2.8 million. August was the first month that recreational sales exceeded medicinal sales. Recreational sales decreased for the first time in September and held steady at about $31 million over the next few months.
December brought another increase as recreational sales passed $35 million for the first time. Recreational sales in January 2015 came in at nearly $36.5 million,commercial grow racks so it remains yet to be seen at what point sales will plateau . Tax revenue associated with the sales has been well below most prior projections. Figure 1 provides monthly tax, licensing, and fee revenue data for both recreational and medical marijuana in 2014. All data are from the Colorado Department of Revenue. As seen in the figure, revenue from medicinal sales remained relatively constant in 2014, ranging from a low of $1.41 million to a high of $1.87 million. Some expected the number of medicinal marijuana patients to decrease with the roll out of recreational marijuana, but the number of residents with a valid red card actually increased by over 4,000 to reach a total of 115,467 . Governor Hickenlooper originally estimated the state would receive $134 million in marijuana tax revenue in the 2014–2015 fiscal year. This figure was revised in April to approximately $114 million . When the final tax revenues from 2014 were tabulated, the state had collected $76 million, $63.4 million in taxes and the remaining revenue from licensing and other fees. The state of Washington collected approximately $22.7 million in tax revenues and fees for marijuana sales that began in July . Under the tax structure approved by voters, the first $40 million in marijuana excise tax revenue is mandated to go toward school construction. Revenue beyond this amount is not designated for particular purposes. In 2014, excise tax revenue totaled $13.3 million, which fell below expectations. January 2015 showed signs of greater optimism as $36.4 million in recreational marijuana was sold, resulting in over $2.35 million in excise tax revenue for schools. This is the first month excise tax revenue exceeded $2 million. In January 2014, excise tax revenue totaled just $200,000 . In sum, revenue from legal recreational and medicinal marijuana continues to grow steadily, despite the fact that revenue levels have not approached what many originally projected.
For numerous reasons, the continued unfolding of the recreational marijuana market merits watching. Stricter packaging rules for edible marijuana products were recently adopted. In March 2015, the state had to defend legalized marijuana in federal court for the first time in response to a lawsuit filed by Nebraska and Oklahoma officials.A recent study estimated that “out-of-state visitors currently represent about 44 percent of metro area retail sales and about 90 percent of retail sales in heavily visited mountain communities. Visitor demand is most prevalent in the state’s mountain counties, where combined medical and retail marijuana sales more than doubled after retail sales were legalized in January, 2014” . In some areas, much of the revenue generated through marijuana sales comes from out-of-state visitors. Regulations initially imposed differentiated sales limits whereby state residents could purchase four times the amount of marijuana per day than an out-of-state visitor. The tiered limits were intended to limit the amount of marijuana transported across state borders. Proposals to equalize these limits would likely spur greater tax revenue collection in certain parts of the state. Thus far, beyond funds earmarked for school construction, marijuana revenue has financed the regulatory apparatus necessary to oversee the state’s growing recreational and medical marijuana marketplace. Marijuana revenue has also been allocated to youth drug prevention, public safety, and public education. State officials have launched several advertising campaigns to inform residents and tourists about marijuana laws and regulations regarding its use. To date, more than $5 million has been spent on these public awareness campaigns with more to come. The amount the state is permitted to spend may depend on whether voters collectively decide to let it keep revenues in excess of TABOR limits. The low level of response to alcohol is one of several aspects of an alcohol response that have been shown to relate to concurrent or future heavy drinking, alcohol problems, and alcohol use disorders .
The low LR was initially shown through alcohol challenges to characterize drinkers at higher risk for AUD where, at similar blood alcohol levels and similar drinking histories, those at higher AUD risk demonstrated lower intensities of reaction to alcohol for subjective feelings of intoxication and levels of alcohol induced increases in body sway . The low LR phenomenon was also demonstrated to relate to higher AUD risk using a retrospective measure of the number of drinks needed across up to four effects . The lower alcohol responses associated with the low LR also relate to biological differences beyond subjective feelings and are genetically influenced . The biological markers associated with the low LR included several aspects of central nervous system functioning such as lower alcohol-related changes in adrenocorticotropic hormone , background cortical electroencephalogram measures of alpha rhythm patterns, and event-related potential P3 wave latency . The finding that aspects of the low LR were observed in CNS measures led to a search for brain mechanisms that might contribute to the lower intensity of alcohol response. One series of studies compared functional magnetic resonance imaging blood oxygen-level dependent signal results following alcohol and placebo beverages during cognitive tasks in up to 60 matched pairs of individuals with high and low LRs to alcohol . As summarized in the most recent of those papers , although the LR groups were similar on their performance on an emotional face recognition task, those with low LRs demonstrated lower BOLD responses in processing different types of facial affect relative to a control condition in task-relevant brain regions such as the insula and anterior cingulate. Those results were seen during fMRI sessions with alcohol and during sessions with placebo. Those findings suggest that,greenhouse growing racks compared with matched high LR subjects, individuals with low LR potentially required greater activation in relevant brain regions, including the middle and inferior frontal gyri, cingulate, and insula, to process emotion-laden faces. Subsequent follow-up of these subjects demonstrated that aspects of the fMRI patterns added significantly to the alcohol challenge-based measure of low LR in predicting future heavier drinking and alcohol problems . The authors concluded that those results indicate that the low LR to alcohol phenomenon might relate to problems recognizing more subtle effects of some modest sensory inputs, including modest levels of intoxication. The ability to decode facial affect is important when assessing one’s immediate social environment. This process provides valuable information regarding others’ internal affective state, enabling behavioral adaptation according to others’ thoughts and intentions, steps that facilitate social interactions in daily life. Impairments in decoding basic and complex emotional facial expressions of others have been consistently reported in individuals with AUD, even when they are sober , and AUD is associated with difficulties in emotional processing . Such deficits might impede emotional self-regulation and social interactions . While there is evidence that individuals with AUD have emotional processing deficits, less is known about whether the observed deficits are sequela of chronic alcohol consumption or if they predate heavy drinking in a manner potentially associated with a LR phenotype. Evidence that such findings might predate heavy drinking come from reports of lower activation in middle temporal and inferior frontal gyri in response to an emotion-based psychological test , and attenuated amygdala activation to faces expressing fear in young individuals with AUD relatives .
In addition, youth at high risk for substance use disorders have been found to exhibit greater activation in medial prefrontal, precuneus, and occipital cortices on an angry/anxious facial emotion recognition matching task compared with low risk, family history negative individuals . Taken together, these differences suggest impaired affective processing in non-heavy drinking individuals at high familial risk for AUD. The amygdala is a central structure in the limbic system that is associated with affective, stress, and reward processing in coordination with the prefrontal cortex . The emotional face matching paradigm of Hariri et al. is a widely used neuro imaging procedure designed to activate the amygdala. The original version was limited to negative emotions like fear and anger, and modifications of the paradigm have been developed that include positive emotional stimuli that can be used in neuro imaging experiments of reward . Positive emotions activate additional brain regions including the ventrolateral and medial PFC, the insula, and inferior frontal gyrus . Overall, these findings support the need to examine different emotional stimuli separately because different brain regions might react differently to negative versus positive emotions. Recent fMRI studies have begun to examine functional integration, or connectivity, between brain regions by using statistical techniques that examine relationships among two or more regions represented by distinct fMRI BOLD time-series analyses . Positive functional connectivity between regions is thought to reflect patterns of synchronous activity or increased communication. One might hypothesize that differences in connectivity between brain regions might be related to the LR group differences reported in the Paulus et al. paper, as connectivity analyses better capture underlying functional brain networks as opposed to isolated regional brain activation. In the case of the functional networks involved in recognition of emotions expressed in pictures of faces, it is likely that the connections between the cortex and sub-cortical limbic regions, including the amygdala, are critically important. . There is a growing literature documenting disrupted PFCamygdala connections of the fron to-limbic pathways in response to alcohol . Specifically, Gorka et al. examined functional connectivity between the PFC and amygdala in a two-session , double-blind, within subjects cross-over pilot fMRI study of 12 heavy social drinkers during the same emotional processing task used by Paulus et al. . These authors reported that during the processing of a broad range of emotional stimuli including angry, fearful, and happy faces, alcohol significantly reduced functional coupling between the amygdala and orbital frontal cortex differentially depending on the facial emotion presented . Another study examined resting-state functional connectivity in 83 non-AUD alcohol drinkers and found a positive association between increased alcohol misuse scores with decreased amygdaladorsal anterior cingulate cortex connectivity . These data indicate that the underlying processing of emotional signals required to detect a potential threat in the environment and make an appropriate response are altered while intoxicated. However, neither of these protocols included a measure of the LR to alcohol, a phenotype associated with future heavy drinking and alcohol problems. This study presents the results of secondary analyses of amygdala-based functional networks using data from the fMRI data set reported in Paulus et al. . These new analyses used generalized psychophysiological interactions , a technique that allows for the examination of connectivity between two brain areas as a specific function of the task of interest. gPPI was developed to allow for the use of more than two task conditions in the same model while also improving model fit .