A second story in the Daily Breeze announced Councilmember Hahn’s proposal to adopt a new city tax on medical cannabis. The Councilmember seems to be following the lead of the Oakland City Council, which recently placed a similar measure on the ballot at the urging of local cannabis collectives. The collectives hope paying extra tax will garner favor in the public eye, and some advocates think the proposal creates an incentive for jurisdictions to tax and regulate collectives instead of ban them. The verdict is still out on both counts. What is clear is that there is no consensus among collective operators or patients about the proposal. Tax-paying operators may balk at more over head, and patients have a reasonable fear that collectives will pass along the cost to the end user. Much more debate is needed before the community gets behind this proposal.

The message that medical cannabis patients pay sales tax resonates with the media, community, and elected officials, who see this revenue as a partial solution to the state’s budget woes. Few would be so enthusiastic, however, if they stopped to consider the burden sales tax places on sick and dying patients – or that the estimated $100 million in medical cannabis sales tax is only 0.4% of this year’s $42 billion budget shortfall.

Americans for Safe Access (ASA) argued against sales tax on medicine in 2005, but the BOE ruled that medical cannabis did not qualify as a tax-exempt prescription medicine. There is more work to be done in persuading the BOE to abandon this position, and in adopting state legislation to relieve this burden from patients and protect some of the state’s oldest MCDC form crushing liabilities for uncollected sales tax.

The BOE erred in making medical cannabis subject to sales tax, but MCDC operators must collect and pay the tax until we can change the policy. Penalties for failing to comply are severe. Additionally, California Attorney General Jerry Brown mentioned sales tax compliance as one of the criteria state law enforcement should consider when evaluating the legal status of an MCDC when he published his landmark guidelines for medical cannabis last year.

In response to pressure from ASA, the BOE updated its policy to allow MCDC operators to file a “waiver for an incomplete application” when applying for a Seller’s Permit. The waiver allows the applicant to decline to state what he or she sells or to identify the suppliers – thus avoiding self-incrimination. You must obtain the waiver from a BOE field office.