Winding down the war on drugs in Denver will require hiring 26 additional police officers, according to city officials.

More enforcement police. More vice officers. More traffic cops.

Who would have thought that legalizing a recreational drug might provoke so much more illegal activity? Why, you’d almost suspect city officials were hunkering down at the milking stool to get their hands on a potential cash cow — or a pot industry that is being portrayed as such.

But perish that unworthy thought. As one police official explained to a city council committee last week, his department processes 3,200 DUIs annually and about 100 of those are DUIDs — or driving under the influence of drugs. And the department anticipates DUIDs will climb by 5 percent once recreational retail marijuana outlets take off.

So that’s an additional five arrests. Can you begin to appreciate the looming crush of new work? No doubt the six new officers slated for assignment to traffic and DUIs should be able to give those cases the attention they deserve.

(It’s conceivable he meant a 5 percent boost in total DUIs, but that would amount to a leap in DUIDs of 160 percent. What?)

Another official assured council members that “drug investigations are becoming more complex” as Colorado loosens restrictions on pot. And those complex investigations will only increase, he said.

Not every council member nodded dutifully at such estimates. Robin Kniech pointed out that “it’s not as if no one used marijuana yesterday and now they’re all using it.” And yet the city, she added, is proposing quadrupling the number of officers assigned to pot-related duties.

“Are we trying to recover the new costs [through a proposed pot sales tax] or is our goal to cover all of the uncovered marijuana costs, most of which pre-existed Amendment 64?” she wondered.

Only new costs, she was assured.

Now, some of us voted to wind down the war on drugs in part because we thought it might save public money along the way in enforcement and court expenses, but that hope was apparently naive. Indeed, Mayor Michael Hancock’s administration is proposing a city sales tax on pot of 5 percent that could be hiked to 10 percent not only to fund more police but also additional staff and resources for the planning and legal departments, Excise and Licensing, the parks department, Denver Health, and Environmental Health. Denver Cares would get a new van to ferry drug-addled patients, although no one has any idea — none, really — whether consumption will actually spike.

Proper regulation of cannabis shops will of course cost money (although the state is the leading regulatory player), and the industry should pay for it through fees and taxes. But it wasn’t always possible to tell from the presentation to the council which of the regulatory services used to justify a city tax were novel to cannabis and which, such as fire inspections, would apply to other new businesses, too.

The worry here is not so much that a 5 percent city tax on top of existing sales taxes plus a proposed 10 percent state sales tax (which local governments would share) and a 15 percent state excise tax will push consumers to the cheaper black market, although that dynamic will surely kick in at some point if the taxes keep rising. But it’s unseemly for government to target a new category of enterprises — one explicitly approved by voters — as funding sources for speculative needs.

Council members Jeanne Faatz and Charlie Brown appeared most eager to spread pot taxes far and wide, with Faatz claiming voters wanted pot taxes for basic services and to “enrich the general fund.”

“They said legalize it, but tax the hell out of it,” she added.

They did? How exactly did voters communicate that desire? Amendment 64 called for an excise tax for schools that will be on the ballot this fall, but proponents never sold it as a budgetary cure-all at the local level.

We won’t know for a couple of years what the full effects of pot sales will be, one official sensibly predicted. Maybe politicians should keep their funding ambitions in check until then as well.

E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.