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Cannabis regulation efforts are usually sold to voters or legislators with the express promise that a state will be able to milk the new industry for all it’s got through cannabis taxes. Don’t believe me? Well, look no further than California’s landmark Proposition 64, also known as the Control, Regulate and Tax Adult Use of Marijuana Act. Prop. 64’s third finding and declaration states explicitly that:
Currently, marijuana growth and sale is not being taxed by the State of California, which means our state is missing out on hundreds of millions of dollars in potential tax revenue every year. The Adult Use of Marijuana Act will tax both the growth and sale of marijuana to generate hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
In other words, from the inception, these programs were designed in large part to raise revenue for the state. And the state does so by funneling money out of the nascent industry in an extremely aggressive way – which is why I (only sort of hyperbolically) called this theft last year.
California is not alone in this, and there are certainly many other states with regressive and punitive tax schemes that all but
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