HF308 would repeal one of the strangest laws on Minnesota's books: the illegal drug tax. Yes, you read that right. Minnesota currently has a law that requires anyone who possesses illegal drugs to purchase tax stamps from the Department of Revenue. If a drug dealer is caught without the stamps, they get hit with a tax penalty on top of their criminal charges. The law dates back to the 1980s and was designed as an extra enforcement tool during the War on Drugs. Representative Jessica Hanson introduced HF308 with co-author Aisha Gomez to finally get rid of it.

The law works like this: if you possess marijuana, controlled substances, or other illegal drugs above certain quantities, you are supposed to buy tax stamps - discreet stickers that you attach to your illegal drugs to prove you paid the tax. Of course, virtually nobody ever bought the stamps because doing so would be admitting to a crime. Instead, the tax was almost exclusively used as an additional punishment after someone was already arrested. The state would assess the unpaid tax, plus penalties, creating a financial burden on top of criminal penalties that fell hardest on people who were already in the worst situations.

With cannabis now legal in Minnesota, the drug tax stamp law has become even more absurd. Cannabis was one of the primary substances the tax was designed to cover, and that product is now sold legally with its own tax structure. HF308 would clean up this anachronism, repeal the tax entirely, and make the technical changes needed to remove references to it from Minnesota's tax code. The bill is the House companion to SF209, which takes the same approach in the Senate.