Missouri Supreme Court strikes down stacking sales taxes on marijuana
Matthew Sanders
Opinion in marijuana sales tax caseDownload
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (KMIZ)
The Missouri Supreme Court has ruled local governments cannot stack their marijuana sales taxes on top of each other.
The ruling, issued Tuesday, prohibits local governments from imposing taxes in incorporated areas where a local sales tax already exists. For example, a county can’t charge marijuana sales tax at a shop inside a city where the city already charges such taxes.
The case stemmed from a lawsuit brought in St. Louis County, where the City of Florissant and the county had each imposed 3% sales taxes.
The owners of Robust Missouri Dispensary 3 LLC sued the county, alleging the tax stacking was unconstitutional. Missouri voters authorized sales taxes for recreational marijuana in November 2022 when they voted to legalize non-medical pot.
Boone County has been charging stacked sales taxes, with both the City of Columbia and Boone County charging 3%, the maximum allowed under law. The state also charges a 6% tax.
The court ruled Tuesday that the county can’t charge the tax in a city where it’s already collected. It overruled a lower court ruling in doing so.
Boone County Presiding Commissioner Kip Kendrick said the county had been anticipating the change.
“What the Boone County Commission did in coordination with our audit treasurer, we segregated those funds,” Kendrick said. “And so as tax revenue came in for department of revenue, we were able to separate out what was collected within the City of Columbia and what was collected at an unincorporated dispensary in the county. Boone County citizens won’t notice anything from our end.”
Kendrick said the county has separated roughly $1 million between Nov. 2023-June 2025. He said the county is waiting on guidance from the Department of Revenue on how to return the money to the state.
The county will continue to appropriate the sales tax collected on the dispensary in unincorporated Boone County, Kendrick said.
More than 150,000 marijuana cases expunged in the state, but work still remains
Courts in Missouri still have work to do wiping away marijuana convictions in the state.
According to Columbia attorney Dan Viets, more than 150,000 marijuana cases have already been expunged in Missouri, but courts still have roughly that many remaining to be expunged. Viets said the courts are late in doing so and much of that work consists of older cases.
“They cannot simply pretend that the older cases aren’t there. They need to be expunged under the law just as much as the recent cases do,” Viets said. “I don’t understand why they’re not using the money that we provided from the sales tax on marijuana for expungement that’s the very highest priority.”
Boone County Circuit Clerk Sherry Terrell said Boone County has expunged roughly 11,000 cases.
The county still has to get through about 350 more, which Terrell said they’re hoping to have completed within the next six months. Terrell said Tuesday’s decision by the Missouri Supreme Court should not impact their ability to expunge cases.
Terrell said like other courts in the state, Boone County has seen delays in old cases.
“We have to go pull all that information off of microfilm because there’s no documents scanned in,” Terrell said. “So, we have to pull charging documents, syncing documents off of microfilm so that we can forward that to the judge to make that final order.