New York publishes cannabis tax by month and by quarter

Adult-use and medical cannabis tax collected, by calendar quarter

Each quarter is the sum of its three published months and is drawn only when all three exist. Nothing here is spread from a coarser figure into a finer one.

The two lines are two different taxes, not two shares of one. Adult-use cannabis carries a wholesale tax on THC potency and a percentage tax at retail; medical cannabis carries an excise on the dispensing organisation. They are shown together because the state publishes them side by side, not because they can be added into a market total.

Adult-use cannabis tax collected, by month received

This is the shape the filing calendar makes, not the shape of the market. A month here is the month the Department of Taxation and Finance received the money, and most of it arrives in the month a quarter's returns fall due.

Adult-use cannabis tax appears in the collections workbook from 2022-07, 5 months before the first dispensary recorded opening to the public on 2022-12-29, because the first piece of the tax is levied on distributors rather than at the counter.

The months before the line item exists are drawn as gaps, not zeros: the workbook carries no Adult Use Cannabis row at all until then. 1 month in the adult-use tax series is negative, and it is published as the state published it - a refund can exceed receipts in a month with no return due.

Retail sales by programme, by calendar year

These are chart data labels, printed to one decimal place in millions, and the report states no basis for them: it does not say whether they are gross or net of discounts, or whether they include sales tax. Both axes are recorded as unstated rather than guessed.

The annual sales figures are chart data labels, and the one check available on them is the report's own arithmetic: adult-use plus medical against the total it prints beside them. That holds for 3 of the 3 columns the table covers - counting columns, because the newest of them is a year to date rather than a year.

Each year's total is also written out in the paragraph above the chart, so the year a bar belongs to is read rather than inferred from its position: 3 of 3 totals are repeated in the report's own prose.

The newest column of that chart is a year-to-date column rather than a year, so it is declared a partial period and drawn as a gap here rather than charted as though the year had ended.

Adult-use dispensaries in operation at year end

The licence register is a snapshot of licences that exist today, so rebuilding a history of openings from it counts today's survivors and today's medical dispensaries rather than the shops that were open in each past year. Checked against the Comptroller's published year-end counts for the 3 years both cover, the rebuilt curve is out by as much as 18 dispensaries, which is why it is not published here.

The current year is not on this chart. The Comptroller reports it as an as-of count part way through the year, which is a partial period; it is declared as one in this state file, with the label the workbook gives it, so the omission is on the record rather than invisible.

State adult-use cannabis tax collected, and local tax distributed, by calendar year

These are not two slices of one pie and they are not on the same clock. The state line is the sum of the twelve months the Department of Taxation and Finance received in that calendar year. The local line is what the Comptroller paid out to municipalities during that year, from a separate local tax, on its own distribution schedule.

A year is drawn only when all twelve of its months exist, so the current year is absent from the state line by the same rule that keeps a partial quarter off the quarterly chart.