State marijuana tax dollars provide limited support locally

The three-county area of Eagle, Garfield and Pitkin encompasses 5,621 sq. miles, has a mixed inhabitants of 133,000 residents, and is residence to dozens of marijuana retailers.

Those shops additionally mixed for greater than $66 million of Colorado’s record-breaking $2.2 billion in retail gross sales of marijuana in 2020, in line with Colorado Department Revenue knowledge.

Consumers of retail marijuana in Colorado are hit with a trio of taxes on the level of sale — there’s a 2.9% state gross sales tax, a 15% marijuana retail gross sales tax (not relevant to medical pot), and a 15% excise tax. Some municipalities — corresponding to Snowmass Village, however not Aspen — have further taxes on hashish. Snowmass voters handed a 5% gross sales tax on marijuana in November 2018.

Taxing marijuana has been a major arguing level for advocates of hashish legalization, together with these “fiscal conservatives who complain America is spending $40 billion a year on the War on Drugs rather than making a few billion taxing it,” journalist Ioan Grillo wrote in “El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency,“ printed in November 2011.

When it involves billions in tax income from pot gross sales, rely Colorado — the place in November 2012 voters handed Amendment 64 legalizing the sale of retail marijuana, pitched…