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exchange for part of their membership fees.5 Accord United
States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Coop., supra at 489.
We now turn to analyze whether petitioner’s furnishing of
its caregiving services is a trade or business that is separate
from its trade or business of providing medical marijuana.
Taxpayers may be involved in more than one trade or business,
see, e.g., Hoye v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 1990-57, and whether
an activity is a trade or business separate from another trade or
business is a question of fact that depends on (among other
things) the degree of economic interrelationship between the two
undertakings, see Collins v. Commissioner, 34 T.C. 592 (1960);
sec. 1.183-1(d)(1), Income Tax Regs. The Commissioner generally
accepts a taxpayer’s characterization of two or more undertakings
as separate activities unless the characterization is artificial
or unreasonable. See sec. 1.183-1(d)(1), Income Tax Regs.
We do not believe it to have been artificial or unreasonable
for petitioner to have characterized as separate activities its
provision of caregiving services and its provision of medical
5 In support of its position, petitioner relies upon Raich
v. Ashcroft, 352 F.3d 1222, 1228 (9th Cir. 2003), vacated and
remanded sub nom. Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005), where the
Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reasoned that the use of
medical marijuana is “different in kind from drug trafficking”.
Petitioner’s reliance on that reasoning is mistaken. The U.S.
Supreme Court rejected the reasoning in Gonzales v. Raich, supra
at 26-28, 31-33, holding that the Controlled Substances Act
applied to individuals within the purview of California’s medical
marijuana law.
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