CAPTION: Kansas legislators resist marijuana legalization ahead of the 2025 session as thousands cross the Missouri border as medical marijuana patients and countless others for recreation. CREDIT TIM CARPENTER/KANSAS REFLECTOR
By Michael Glenn
Our Kansas Legislature recently wrapped up its 2025 session, and many of our legislators from Hutchinson and Reno County cited property taxes as an issue they wanted to help reduce.
While some work was done in the area by eliminating 1.5 mills for state educational purposes, substantial relief promised by candidates did not follow through.
If Kansas legalizes recreational cannabis, which 61% of us already support doing, places a 10% excise tax on all cannabis products and directs those funds to education, we could lower the mill rate for all Kansas property owners and still fully fund education, a main concern when discussing property tax relief.
While specific data isn’t available for Kansas, we can use our neighbors as an example to see how much we could make. Missouri generated $1.5 billion in 2024 from all cannabis sales. In one year. Since Missouri has a little over double the population of Kansas, we’ll take that into consideration for calculating this number.
2,970,606, the population of Kansas, divided by 6,245,466, the population of Missouri, gives us roughly 47.5%, which means Kansas could reasonably expect to produce 47.5% of the sales that Missouri did.
That’s $712,500,000 in Kansas cannabis sales per year. Add a 10% excise tax to that, and you get $71,250,000 in new tax funds the Sunflower State can use.
These funds could play a role in reducing property taxes. Given the estimated collection of property taxes that fund public education in our state, $71.25 million could knock a mill off the bill.
While property taxes are a viable option to use cannabis taxes, there are many other ways to use the funds that would benefit our state.
These funds could help support veterans’ benefits across our state. Many veterans use cannabis products to aid complications of PTSD, and for our state to continue criminalizing and punishing those using cannabis for this purpose is shameful.
These funds could help the public defender crisis our state faces, with fewer and fewer attorneys available in rural Kansas. Every person charged with a crime deserves a fair defense, and cannabis taxes can help the state and district courts find attorneys willing to work.
These funds could help underserved students in Kansas looking to earn a college education through an extended Promise Act Scholarship. The Promise scholarship currently assists students in earning two-year degrees and technical certificates in high-demand jobs, benefiting them personally and our state’s economy and workforce overall. We can improve upon that by providing more funding to this scholarship, investing in our future and the betterment of our youth.
These funds could be used to make our state a better place to raise a family and succeed. Whether you’re a young person looking to go to college or a young family looking for a place to settle, legalizing cannabis would provide benefits to everyone.
With these benefits in mind, I find it troubling that our legislature hasn’t acted upon this already. Cannabis use has been proven to be safer to consume than alcohol and tobacco, drugs which are legal in the United States. From simply just overdose statistics, the CDC estimates that 2,200 Americans die from alcohol poisoning directly every day, not including other alcohol-induced deaths, such as driving under the influence or cirrhosis of the liver.
Consuming enough THC in a given period of time to overdose is impossible to do, according to the same study.
The only overdosing anyone could possibly do with cannabis is when it is mixed with other substances that can be fatal, such as fentanyl. Thankfully, our state has decriminalized fentanyl testing strips in harm reduction efforts, but cannabis could be much safer to consume in Kansas if it were legalized, regulated and labeled for consumers.
Imagine this argument for alcohol: which one is safer to consume, a suspicous looking unlabed bottle with “XXX” written on it, or a labled bottle of liquor that tells you how much alcohol is in the liquor? Which one are you more likely to be able to drink responsibly?
Our state is in a clear position: we can legalize cannabis, make tens of millions in tax revenue, help veterans, stop incriminating people over cannabis and make our state a more attractive place to live.
Or we can continue kicking the can down the road until the federal government *inevitably* legalizes it anyway, making Kansas catch up with the rest of the states who are raking in billions in tax revenue.
If Kansas doesn’t act, we’ll continue giving money away to our neighboring states, which have already undergone cannabis legalization or decriminalization in some form. Thousands of Kansans purchase cannabis for medical purposes in Missouri, as reported in the Kansas Reflector. That’s money that we could have, but we choose not to.
A multi-billion-dollar industry stops in Kanorado and picks back up in Kansas City, Missouri. My only question to our legislators is, are you tired of sending money to other states?
Boyce / April 20, 2025
I think part of the revenue for Missouri is because it sets next to a state that doesn’t have legal cannabis sales, so I think that kind of throws your totals off.
I also think it would be wise to talk to the Law Enforcement and Courts in Legal cannabis states and see what the result of legalizing cannabis has had on them.
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Doug Armstrong / April 20, 2025
Congrats to our state reps for not considering to have this a drug infested state! Having worked with drug addicts for 20 yrs I know all about pot. Nothing reduces the work force or work ethic like pot! Don’t be fooled by this guise of medical.,and that it will produce money for education.It will only line the coffers pockets😒
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