"Marijuana Tax Revenue in States that Regulate Marijuana for Adult Use"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new report and accounting from folks at the Marijuana Policy Project.  Here is how it gets started (with my highlight):

Legalizing marijuana for adults has been a wise investment.  Since 2014 when sales began in Colorado and Washington, legalization policies have provided states a new revenue stream to bolster budgets and fund important services and programs.  As of May 2021, states reported a combined total of $7.9 billion in tax revenue from legal, adult-use marijuana sales.  In addition to revenue generated for statewide budgets, cities and towns have also generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in new revenue from local adult-use cannabis taxes.

Eighteen states have enacted laws legalizing, taxing, and regulating cannabis for adults 21 and older.  Eight of the laws passed in 2020 or 2021, and in seven of those states, licensing and tax collections have not yet begun.  This document reviews each state’s adult-use cannabis tax structure, population, and revenue from legalization.  It does not include medical cannabis tax revenue, application and licensing fees paid by cannabis businesses, additional income taxes generated by workers in the cannabis industry, or corporate taxes paid to the federal government.

The report provides a helpful overview of all the basic tax structures in place for adult-use marijuana as of May 2021, as well as reports on total collections in these states to date. Notably, while Colorado is often thought about as the first legalization state and California is rightly seen as the biggest legalization state, this report details that Washington is as of now the richest state in tax revenues with over $2.5 billion collected.  (But California's tax revenue in 2020 was nearly twice that of Washington's according to this report, so by 2022 we should expect the Golden State to have collected the most tax gold from adult-use marijuana legalization.)