> I think the concern was that we're just replacing illegal cartels with legal cartels.
Agreed, but legal cartels are (marginally) better in that they are forced to operate under the "light of day". This doesn't automatically solve all the problems in se, but it's an important step.
> First, that number is apparently fixed (based on your wording, I'm not familiar personally), but the there is, presumably, no upper-bound on the actual revenues, so as revenues increase, a smaller percentage goes to education.
Yes, I'm just pointing out that the motivation for the tax was not the same as the motivation behind your typical "vice taxes". It was proposed by the people who wrote Amendment 64 (proponents of legalization).
Naturally there's a tradeoff to be made, as you point out, but IMHO, it was a clever attempt to construct the amendment "defensively", to mitigate the risk of people trying to repeal it.
The size of the tax, and what to do with any excess revenues, are where one has to make a value judgement, and it really comes down to whether one thinks income should be redistributed from rich to poor, poor to rich, or neither. That's a separate discussion, though - I think almost anybody would agree that it's better to be debating the exact structure of the tax, than to be stuck debating whether or not we should force the drug trade to happen in a completely unregulated, untaxed, underground market.