NY proposes to tax cocaine dealers

Among the hundreds of proposals contained in Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s second executive budget, which he unveiled on Tuesday in Albany, is a provision that would impose a $3.50-a-gram tax on marijuana and a $200-a-gram tax on other illegal drugs, like cocaine....

The Spitzer administration projects that the proposal would raise $13 million in the 2008-9 fiscal year and $17 million each year thereafter.

Uh, riiiiiiiight. Presumably they are only able to levy these taxes in most cases after the dealers have already been busted, in which case aren't their bank accounts already forfeit to the state? Moreover, this type of law has successfully been challenged in other states under the grounds that it amounts to double jeopardy. I'm totally in the dark about how this makes any honest to goodness fiscal sense; seems like a waste of legistators' time, but clearly there's something I must be missing.