NEWS & RESOURCES

“We’re urging the Legislature and Administration to act quickly and freeze the tax at 15%. If we want a regulated market to survive in California, the time to intervene is now,” O’Gorman Jenkins said. 

"Raising the cannabis excise tax from 15% to 19% during a market collapse is the equivalent of throwing an anchor to a drowning industry,” wrote Alex Freedman to me by email. “AB 564 offers a critical lifeline to California’s legal cannabis market to help stabilize an emerging industry that supports tens of thousands of jobs and millions in state revenue.”

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“For years, cannabis lounges have always been talked about as some kind of game change for dispensaries, but it just hasn’t come to pass,” Alex Freedman, the president of the California Cannabis Operators Association.

“If we continue to pile on more taxes and fees onto our struggling small cannabis businesses, California’s cannabis culture is under serious threat of extinction,” Haney said in a press release. “Instead, we should be looking at how we can support this industry which has barely been given a chance to survive after legalization. If we want to support our cannabis industry that drives millions of visitors to California every year, adding more costs makes absolutely no sense.”

Amy O’Gorman Jenkins, the executive director of the California Cannabis Operators Association, praised the tax cuts in a news release, saying that the “legal cannabis industry is in crisis and immediate tax relief is essential.” 

“Local governments are recognizing what the state hasn’t yet – that our legal cannabis industry is in crisis and immediate tax relief is essential,” Amy O’Gorman Jenkins, executive director of California Cannabis Operators Association.

“4/20 has become a whole new ballgame for California cannabis retailers,” said Freedman, who also serves as president of the California Cannabis Operators Association. “We’re focusing more on community building and running tight operations year-round instead of flashy, one-day promotions.”

O’Gorman Jenkins also warned in her testimony that removing regulated vapes from store shelves would push consumers back into the ”unregulated and unsafe illicit market, which faces none of the legal, environmental, or product safety requirements.”

“At the least we need a freeze this year,” on the excise tax at 15%, says industry lobbyist Amy O’Gorman Jenkins. She would like to go further and see the legislature pass a “fairly substantial tax reduction” for the industry. That may not be possible, she said, due to expensive wildfire relief efforts and the ensuing insurance crisis.

Several hundred California cannabis retailers, tired of the regulatory status quo and worried about an upcoming tax hike, have banded together to form yet another trade organization to lobby lawmakers in Sacramento, several of the organizers told Green Market Report this week.