California should ease up on taxes for marijuana businesses like the one they own together, Woody Harrelson and Bill Maher say.
The actor and comedian jointly complained about the state’s harsh cannabis taxes in a podcast interview released on Monday, known as the unofficial marijuana holiday 4/20.
“California sucks as far as—look, all businesses, but certainly this one,” Maher said on the episode of his Club Random podcast. “They still treat it like it’s poison.”
Harrelson agreed, saying, “They treat it like you’re lucky that we allow you to do this, and so we’re going to tax you 35 percent, which is way more—it’s more than double anything.”
“I don’t even know what’s the second” in terms of highly taxed items, the actor said, citing guns and beer as facing lower rates than cannabis.
“It’s ridiculous that they can just tax the fuck out of you and make it so hard,” he said. “Anyway, I don’t want to bitch and moan. I’m a happy person, generally.”
But Maher said, “I’m not happy about this.”
“I’m never happy when anybody fucks with my money,” he said. “I’m gangster like that.”
Harrelson and Maher own The Woods, a dispensary and cannabis consumption lounge in West Hollywood, where the two smoked joints while filming the new podcast episode.
In California, cannabis faces a 15 percent state excise at the point of purchase, as well as local excise taxes that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. There are also regular state and local sales taxes that apply, plus taxes at other points of the supply chain such as at the cultivation level. Marijuana businesses can additionally face steep licensing fees in order to do business.
Harrelson further complained during the interview with Maher that “they also don’t allow you to write anything off,” an apparent reference to the federal provision known as 280E that blocks marijuana companies from taking tax deductions that are available to businesses in other sectors.
California lawmakers, however, like those in a number of other legal cannabis jurisdictions, have taken steps to decouple the state tax code from the federal policy, allowing operators to write off business expenses on their state taxes.
Maher, for his part, also noted the cannabis industry’s banking access issues.
“For the longest time, it was a very risky business because you couldn’t put the money in the bank, right?” he said. “The banks wouldn’t take ‘your dirty fucking pot money that you fucking hippies got by smoking pot.’”
“And everybody would have truckloads of cash around,” Maher said. “So of course, they were a target for robbers.”
To that point, Harrelson and Maher’s dispensary was burglarized in what appeared to be part of a string of crimes targeting cannabis businesses in the region.
While the situation is changing and more banks are taking on cannabis clients, as the two noted in the new interview, federal legislation to provide a broad fix for the issue has remained stalled for years.
Maher and Harrelson have long publicly embraced their cannabis consumption.
Last year, when Harrelson was asked to pick anyone living or dead he would like to patronize the dispensary’s cannabis cafe, he zeroed in on marijuana icon Bob Marley. But the actor also conceded that he doesn’t think he could go “toke-for-toke” with the late reggae star.
The actor also got involved in marijuana reform advocacy in California, calling on Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to sign a bill legalizing marijuana cafes that passed in 2024, which he did end up approving.
Earlier this year, Harrelson joked about his experiences getting kicked out of two bars for smoking marijuana indoors with the mother of fellow star Matthew McConaughey.
Harrelson separately disclosed in 2017 that used cannabis to help get through a dinner with President Donald Trump.
Last year, Maher said he didn’t get high before attending a dinner with Trump at the White House, joking that it was a “missed opportunity.”
Image element courtesy of Angela George.
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