LIFESTYLE CANNABIS
States Strike Gold with Cannabis Tax Revenue WISCONSIN LOSES OPPORTUNITY WHILE ILLINOIS CASHES IN BY JEAN-GABRIEL FERNANDEZ Illustration by Michael Burmesch.
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ince cannabis was first legalized and taxed in Colorado and Washington in 2012, states where adult-use marijuana sales are legal accumulated nearly $10.4 billion in additional tax revenue. In 2021 alone, states gathered more than $3 billion in additional revenue, according to a recent study published by the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP). The biggest piece of this billion-dollar cake is from California, which gathered more than $1 billion in tax revenue alone due to its massive customer base—MPP recorded $976 million between January and September alone. Second is Washington state, which gathered more than $500 million, followed by Illinois with $387 million. Currently, 18 states have legalized adult-use marijuana, but only 11 have started selling and taxing marijuana; the remaining seven states passed reform legislation in 2020 or 2021, and the transition has not fully taken place yet. Therefore, the $10.4 billion in tax revenue is the result of market activity in merely one-fifth of the states in a still-immature market. Even though weed is a newly legal drug, it already outperforms alcohol when taxing vices in some states. In Washington, alcohol taxes and fees brought in $270 million in 2021, while cannabis brought in twice that, at $530 million, and is growing more profitable at a much faster rate than alcohol. In California, alcohol revenue was $405 million, while cannabis revenue was north of $1 billion. In Illinois, alcohol accounted for $291 million in revenue, nearly $100 million less than weed. But another state made headlines in 2021 for its extreme success in the industry: For Arizona, 2021 was the first year when cannabis was available to purchase, and the state saw $1.2 billion in sales in its first year, demonstrating that marijuana is increasingly popular even in traditionally Republican areas. The Arizona Department of Revenue announced that $196 million in tax revenue had been gathered so far from legal cannabis sales.
CANNABIS SALES DOUBLED IN ILLINOIS IN 2021 As Wisconsin fails to gather any revenue from the green rush, our southern neighbor struck gold. Illinois was posting impressive marijuana sales numbers in 2020 already, selling $670 millions’ worth of weed last year. These numbers doubled in 2021. At year’s end, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation reports that nearly $1.4 billion of legal marijuana was purchased in the state in 2021. Illinois’s success is an outlier, given that the state only legalized marijuana in January 2020. Although Washington and California 68 | SHEPHERD EXPRESS
