Medical Marijuana Brings $50 Million In Taxes & Fees (so far)

  $20,666,145 in collected state & local Excise & Sales Taxes.(so far) That's the real impact for Oklahoma govt., because the people said, "Let those suffering people have access to their medicine!"
  But that's not even close to the full picture of what this has done for giving the state an infusion of new cash. The new business licenses to the OMMA brought in $17,960,000 already. The patient licenses also brought in roughly $12,000,000 (if we assume that one of every 3 applicants was on an approved govt. program which qualified for an 80% discount license fee).

Cost of running the OMMA

  The Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority (OMMA) is the branch of the state Health Dept. which is statutorily tasked with managing this new program. They received a generous budget of about $8.5 million for this current fiscal year.
  ​Sales of medicine through the end of July are now $133,329,963. Almost all of that came in the past 7 months. the State's portion of taxation on the product is 11.5%, or $15,332,745.

  So the local govts. somehow got over $5 million that the statutes did not approve. It was done through a ruling from the Oklahoma Tax Commission, that the 7% tax that we voters approved, was really intended to be an unusual category of taxation known as excise tax. 

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  The OTC then decided that since the state tax code didn't specifically exempt this medicine from sales taxes, then it must be enforced, as well. Almost all items subject to excise taxes (gasoline is a good example) are exempted from sales taxes.

Other State Beneficiaries of Marijuana Taxes

So, of the $50 million in taxes & fees, the state is the recipient of about $45 million.  The OMMA is first priority for budgeting, according to the statutory language of SQ788. But after assigning $8.5 million to run that function,  we still have at least $36.5 million taken in to state govt. in the past 11 months. Here's how it's supposed to be divided:

1. $27,375,000 is awarded to the state Dept. of Education, for common education. Higher Ed. is not a named recipient.
2.  $9,125,000 is awarded to drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs operated by the Dept. of Health, despite the fact that the Oklahoma Dept. of Mental Health & Substance Abuse Services (ODMHSAS) is the proper department for that function of state govt.

 This is a very simplified picture of the fiscal aspects. The state begins a new fiscal year every July, so the actual numbers will look quite different.  What we can expect, if current  activity continues; is for over $5 million to be generated each month by the OMMA. That's about $120 million per year, with only $8.5 million in operational fees. When fines & other infraction penalties are found there will be even more revenue generated (most infractions carry a $5,000 fine).

•   So the State Health Dept. of Health needs to develop a legitimate use for the roughly $27 million they will be awarded for substance abuse services. In other words, Marijuana use will help solve alcohol abuse in multiple ways.
•   And our public schools will get an $85 million  infusion, which is more than enough to pay for all campus law enforcement personnel and to ramp up efforts at preventing exploitation of children from black market drug cartels.

Legalizing the medical use of this very safe alternative to other dangerous drugs, is proving to be a potential solution to make our society more safe. And that's the best news of all, If... and only if, the state govt. appropriates effectively and runs these govt. services diligently.

Taxation text of SQ788