Last week I posted some discussion of the Drug Tax phenomenon, along with a scan of a notice one of our readers received following his being charged with an alleged marijuana offense. Last night I got an email from Matt Potter, president of North Carolina State University's Students for Sensible Drug Policy chapter and a member of the Student Senate, with some very revealing information recounted from his freshman year in a Law and Justice course. Matt wrote:

My freshman year of college I had a professor for Law and Justice who was the interim director of the NC Illegal Substances Tax division, and he loved going off on tangents talking about his job... [H]e told me several things [about drug taxes], such as that the burden of proof in a drug tax hearing is actually on the defendant. In addition to hearsay being enough to find people responsible for the tax, the person can actually be acquitted of the crime (or not charged at all) and still be found responsible for paying the tax. It is also a retrospective tax. He explained this by saying: If your grandmother smoked an ounce in the 60s and we found out about it, we could collect the tax from her on that ounce.

Well there it is, as Matt put it, right "from the horse's (ass') mouth." I think the evidence is more than clear -- drug taxes are an outrage. As I commented last week, "take this drug tax and..."