Friends, if you haven’t seen it already, I strongly recommend the recent series of articles by Marijuana Business Daily about what they found in a response to their Freedom of Information Act request from the Internal Revenue Service about 280E. (link) It’s a sobering look at the reality of federal taxes for the Cannabis industry.
I’ve mused before that Cannabis suffers from a quantum physics-esque problem of being simultaneously illegal and highly regulated. (link) The double whammy of 280E and high state and local taxes is but one of the consequences of that paradox. The industry remains creative in finding ways to work within those constraints (e.g., is a non-fungible token of my CBD knish legal?), at times profitably, and yet it seems at times to be a Sisyphean task. Tailwinds have picked up all around, but strong headwinds remain firmly in place. I go back to my question from my last Cannabis Musings – how does the industry find long-term, workable solutions to such implacable headwinds if there’s no federal legalization?
