Benjamin Franklin said that taxes, like death, are one of life’s few certainties. But due to a glitch in the technical language of California’s successful marijuana legalization initiative, the state’s pot smokers may prove him wrong.

California’s marijuana legalization initiative is designed to raise significant tax revenue for the state. When legal recreational marijuana sales commence on Jan. 1, 2018, the initiative applies a 15 percent excise tax on recreational and medical marijuana, as well as some taxes on marijuana producers based on the weight of each plant grown. The state’s 7.5 percent sales tax is tacked on top of that for recreational marijuana, but the ballot proposition repeals that tax for medical marijuana. The idea was to give medical marijuana users a tax break relative to recreational users once the initiative’s new taxes begin in 2018. But because the Jan. 1, 2018, target date was omitted in the relevant subsection of the 62-page initiative, the medical marijuana sales tax elimination instead became effective this week when the measure passed. [Read more at Washington Post]