It usually not a good idea to be first.

I was fervently against the legalization of medical marijuana in 2000. I was even more against the legalization of recreational marijuana in 2012. Most recently, I was against allowing medical marijuana dispensaries to sell recreational marijuana.

I’m not against legalized marijuana. I don’t use it nor will I ever use it, but if others want to, that’s their business. I feel the same way about alcohol. I was against being the first to do so.

But because we rushed to the front of the line, Colorado taxpayers have borne the brunt of a painful process.

It made sense on the surface. Legalize pot and decriminalize a portion of the population that shouldn’t be branded as criminals. Tax it and make money for the state.

It hasn’t been the rosy rollout the proponents promised, though.

Colorado was immediately sued by neighboring states. Driving through Kansas in the early 2000s with Colorado plates put a bullseye on your bumper.

Recently, ProPublica and The Denver Gazette reported that Kyle Lambert, the Marijuana Enforcement Division’s deputy senior director, acknowledged during a meeting that the amount of chemically converted hemp being sold illegally as marijuana is far greater than the agency has publicly disclosed.

Lambert also described anomalies in the system the state uses to track marijuana production and sales, saying the extent of suspicious transactions in the system “would probably explode your minds.”

The predictable result is honest cultivators filed suit last week, claiming the state owes millions of dollars in tax refunds. It alleges the enforcement failures made them shoulder an unfair portion of the tax burden.

“I think that it’s very safe to say that this is the largest financial crime against the taxpayers of Colorado in the history of the state,” Justin Trouard, the owner of Saguache-based Mammoth Farms said.

The cultivators have every justification to sue. In its rush to legalize, Colorado has had to create the regulatory framework from the ground up. That made it full of loopholes to exploit. Other states have the benefit of learning from Colorado’s mistakes.

Should the lawsuit succeed, who pays for it? Not the original activists who rushed us to the front of the line. Not the regulators who couldn’t close all of the loopholes without a template to follow. Most definitely not the fraudsters who exploited those loopholes for their personal enrichment.

Nope. None of those. You and I will pay. Again.

So non-pot users are forced to pay so others can get high. There’s no justice in that. And all because we were the first.

I was in the car business for years. It was a widely held maxim that you don’t buy a new model until it’s been on the market for a couple of years. It takes that long to get the bugs out of a new platform.

I don’t want to be the financial Guinea pig for any group with an agenda. The apostles of pot made Colorado that for marijuana. With nearly every initiative shoved onto the ballot, Colorado continues to be the laboratory rat for fringe groups nationwide.

Cannabis is now legal in some form in 40 states and legal for recreational use in 24. Colorado has paid much of the legal and regulatory price for all of them. We keep paying because we had to be first.

Potheads in Montana, Missouri and Vermont all thank you for your financial contributions to their legal buzz.