The North Carolina Senate keeps advancing a bill that would legalize medical marijuana here, as the state remains one of the few holdouts in the country without such a law.
Senators in the Finance Committee passed the bill Wednesday, after a brief discussion about the taxes and other revenue it might bring to North Carolina if passed. No one had a solid estimate, but based on other states, it would likely bring in tens of millions of dollars a year.
For example, the News & Observer previously reported that Michigan made $45 million from medical marijuana last year. It has similar marijuana tax structures as what North Carolina is proposing, and around the same size population.
Some members of the public came to the General Assembly Wednesday to tell lawmakers they should charge companies even more money to get licensed to sell marijuana here than the bill proposes.
“I think y’all are leaving a lot of money on the table here,” said Pat Oglesby, a Chapel Hill tax attorney who has studied and worked on marijuana legalization issues in other states.
Oglesby said a Maryland dispensary recently sold for $8 million. The North Carolina bill proposes charging dispensaries $50,000 to get a license, plus another $10,000 a year to keep it, with extra fees if they open multiple locations. Oglesby said those numbers should be higher.
Others said the opposite, however, fearing that higher taxes and fees would be passed on to the patients, via higher costs. And if costs get too high at dispensaries, several people said, patients might buy their marijuana from drug dealers instead of through official channels.
Scott Lewis of Creedmore said Wednesday he thinks he would qualify for medical marijuana if this bill passes, due to a tumor. But he questioned why there needs to be a higher-than-normal sales tax on marijuana, plus extra costs imposed on growing equipment, plus fees on dispensaries.
“The patient will pay that,” Lewis told lawmakers, later adding: “I’m going to go to the black market if you put a 10%, 18% tax on it.”
In the end the lawmakers didn’t heed either side, and kept all the tax and fee numbers the same.
To opponents of the bill, marijuana is so dangerous that letting doctors prescribe it to their patients, even in limited circumstances, is not worth the millions of dollars it would bring to the state.
“The social cost … will far exceed any amount we might make in revenues,” said Rev. Mark Creech, leader of the Christian Action League, during Wednesday’s hearing.
The bill’s main sponsor, Republican Sen. Bill Rabon of New Brunswick County, said he has been working with the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services to get their advice for public health issues.
“We met with DHHS, and they had some very good ideas we’re going to be incorporating,” he said.
Creech and other conservative Christian leaders who oppose the bill are in a small minority. An Elon University poll earlier this year found that nearly three in four North Carolinians support medical marijuana — and even a slim majority support full legalization.
This legislation, SB 711, would not fully legalize marijuana. And its GOP sponsors have tried to recognize the concerns of opponents. They have said at every hearing the bill has gotten at the legislature so far that they purposefully wrote it so that, if passed…
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