DeBoyer Voted for Michigan's 24% Cannabis Tax. Now He Wants It Suspended for a Year

On October 22, twelve days before Michigan elects a governor, state Rep. Jay DeBoyer put out a short release through the House Republican caucus in Lansing. The Clay Township Republican, who chairs the House Oversight Committee and is running for lieutenant governor on John James's ticket, said he would soon introduce a bill to suspend the state's 24% wholesale tax on marijuana for 12 months while lawmakers decide whether it works. (S1, S2)

The release did not hedge. The tax, DeBoyer said, "was created and signed in haste by the Whitmer administration to generate revenue, and we've seen the impacts of that haste." It was raising "tens of millions of dollars less in revenue than what was projected," there was "no enforcement agency to collect it," and it was pushing customers back to the illicit market. "This is a lose-lose," he said. (S1)

Then came a sentence most candidates would have cut. "I supported the original legislation at large for needed road funding," DeBoyer said, "but I was always skeptical to impose a tax with no mechanism to collect it." The House Journal for September 25, 2025, records what supporting it meant. On Roll Call No. 234, House Bill 4951, the Comprehensive Road Funding Tax Act, passed 78 to 21. DeBoyer's name is in the yeas. (S1, S3)

Thirteen months after that vote, the man who helped pass the tax is campaigning to pause it, and the state's own numbers give him material. The Michigan State Budget Office's monthly financial report for July shows the wholesale marijuana tax brought in $73.4 million from the start of the fiscal year through June. The same report carries the May 2026 consensus forecast for the full fiscal year, which ends September 30: $315 million. When the Senate Fiscal Agency analyzed the bill in September 2025, it put the yield at about $420.7 million a year. (S4, S5)

There is a wrinkle in the state's figure that the campaign version leaves out. Of that $73.4 million, $37.4 million arrived in the single month of June. Collections are lumpy, which means the tax is neither as dead as its opponents say nor as healthy as a straight-line forecast would need it to be. To reach the May forecast, the state would have needed about $242 million more in July, August and September, more than three times what it had collected in the levy's first six months. (S4)

The tax itself is simple to describe. Since January 1, 2026, a grower or processor pays 24% of the wholesale price the first time it sells marijuana to a retail licensee, and a retailer that grows and processes its own product pays 24% of an average wholesale price the Treasury Department publishes each quarter. That sits on top of the 10% retail excise tax and 6% sales tax that Michigan voters approved in 2018. The revenue goes to roads, through a new Neighborhood Road Fund, after a small carve-out for administration. (S5, S6)

The fiscal agency saw the risk coming. Its analyst, David Zin, wrote that by raising the price of marijuana at wholesale, the tax risked lowering consumption at retail, and he estimated a 14.4% drop in consumption under a medium level of price response. Greater responsiveness, or retailers absorbing part of the tax instead of passing it through, he warned, would reduce what the bill raised. In August, Higher Love Cannabis Co., a Marquette chain that had promised customers "You won't pay it. We will," closed five of its nine Upper Peninsula stores and cited the new tax. (S5, S7)

The Cannabis Regulatory Agency's September report shows a market absorbing a new cost without much room to raise prices. Adult-use sales were $242.3 million in September, down about 3.5% from $250.9 million a year earlier. The average retail ounce of flower sold for $59.99, down from $63.16 in September 2025. The state had 837 licensed adult-use retailers at the end of the month, 14 fewer than a year before, and 797 Class C growers, down from 834. (S8, S9)

The number in the CRA report that has drawn the least attention may say the most about the tax. On September 30, Michigan's processors were holding 727,875 pounds of adult-use flower, compared with 267,001 pounds a year earlier, nearly three times as much. Flower on retail shelves and in back rooms rose to 211,518 pounds from 148,372. The report does not say why. One reading is the old Michigan problem of too many plants and too little demand. Another is that a tax charged when product moves to a retailer gives everyone upstream a reason to hold inventory where it has not yet been taxed. The data cannot settle it, and the report offers no analysis of it. (S8, S9)

The industry has been here before with this tax, in court. The Michigan Cannabis Industry Association sued in October 2025, arguing that the tax violates the state constitution by modifying the legalization law voters approved in 2018. Court of Claims Judge Sima G. Patel declined to block the tax and rejected most of the association's arguments, but she let one question go to trial. "It is not certain on this record whether the 24% wholesale excise tax will impact prices to the extent purchasers will be driven to the illicit marijuana market," Patel wrote in January. "Discovery is required to examine how the tax will impact the purposes of the [voter initiated law.]" (S10)

The association's executive director, Robin Schneider, has gone further than the lawsuit does. She told Bridge Michigan in September that many business owners have told her they simply are not paying the tax. "They're operating on a wish and a prayer right now," she said. If that is widespread, it would help explain both DeBoyer's complaint that nobody is collecting the tax and the lumpy June figure. The association endorsed James for governor on September 16, calling the tax "unconstitutional" and saying he had vowed to repeal or sharply reduce it. (S11, S12)

“I supported the original legislation at large for needed road funding, but I was always skeptical to impose a tax with no mechanism to collect it.”

— Rep. Jay DeBoyer, R-Clay Township, Michigan House of Representatives, Oct. 22, 2026

James made the tax a campaign issue in August, arguing that it "drives up prices, gives illegal operators a competitive edge and has already fallen far short of revenue projections." Bridge Michigan reported that a fundraiser hosted by executives of the JARS Cannabis dispensary chain netted his campaign nearly $90,000, and that James has not said how he would replace the road money if the tax disappears. (S11)

Jocelyn Benson, the secretary of state and Democratic nominee, has declined to pick a side. She called the tax a "new and emerging issue" in September. "There's a lot of data yet to be determined on that particular tax," she told Bridge. "At the same time, I want to make sure that any changes we are making to our tax code do not come at the expense of driving up costs for Michiganders." Her running mate, Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks, voted for the tax. That is the strongest case for keeping it: the roads still need money, the tax has not had a full year, and a 12-month pause would blow a hole in a fund that is only now filling. (S11, S2)

The repeal side already has a bill. Sen. Jonathan Lindsey, a Coldwater Republican, introduced Senate Bill 810 on February 26 to scrap the tax entirely, with four Republican and three Democratic cosponsors. "I also don't believe that in the long term this mechanism will generate the expected revenue, especially if sales go down as a result of the increased taxes or if legal challenges against the tax prevail," he said then. The bill went to the Senate Government Operations Committee, and it has not had a hearing. (S13, S2)

A year ago the tax had dissenters in the House, too. Rep. Jaime Greene, a Republican who voted no, entered a protest in the journal the day it passed: the bill, she said, "imposes a new 24% marijuana excise tax and diverts all of that revenue away from local governments that voters were promised." DeBoyer is now making a version of the argument she made then, from the other side of the vote. (S3)

1. Nov. 3, 2026: Michigan elects a governor. James has pledged to repeal or sharply reduce the tax; Benson has not taken a position.
2. DeBoyer's suspension bill: formal introduction and committee referral, which his caucus said would follow soon after the Oct. 22 announcement.
3. The State Budget Office's next monthly reports, which will show whether July through September collections came anywhere near the $315 million forecast.
4. Michigan Cannabis Industry Association v. State of Michigan: discovery and trial in the Court of Claims on whether the tax undermines the 2018 initiative.

DeBoyer's release ended with the procedure: the plan would be read into the record and referred to a House committee upon introduction. It did not say which committee, or whether a bill could move in the weeks left in a lame-duck session. The timing pointed at November 3, and at an industry whose trade association has already endorsed the top of his ticket. (S1, S12)

The vote he cast in September 2025 is still in the journal, one name in a column of 78. So is the problem he now says he saw then. Michigan built a tax on a transfer between licensees and gave the job of collecting it to the Treasury Department, in a market where the CRA counts more than 700,000 pounds of flower sitting at processors. "Otherwise," DeBoyer said of the tax if it is not paused and reconsidered, "it's a useless tax." A year ago he voted to create it. (S1, S3, S8)

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