NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – You know taxes are a fact of life, or, as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, "the price we pay for civilization."
But some of things we're taxed on can seem oddly random, if not downright bizarre.
In certain states and cities, you'll pay special taxes for buying a deck of cards, possessing illegal drugs and possibly buying things from those in the buff. The taxes aren't always levied directly on you but on the owner of a business you patronize. But businesses often find ways to pass that added cost onto customers.
Straight from the "Go figure" files, here are just 10 peculiar state and local taxes we found, courtesy of information from tax information publisher CCH, Inc. and the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit tax policy research group that advocates tax simplification measures.
Illegal drug tax: At least 11 states, including Alabama, North Carolina and Nevada, tax people who possess illegal drugs. Usually, though, you have to be in possession of a minimum quantity (for example, over 42.5 grams of marijuana in North Carolina) to be subject to the tax.
But no need to wait for the police to cuff you before you cough up the cash. In North Carolina, for instance, when you acquire an illegal drug (or even "moonshine"), you can go to the Department of Revenue and pay your tax, in exchange for which you'll receive stamps to affix to your illegal substance. The stamps serve as evidence you paid the tax on the illegal product.
Don't worry that you might get in trouble for admitting you have enough drugs to fuel a rave party for years. You needn't provide any identification to get the stamps and it's illegal for revenue employees to rat you out.
Still, according to North Carolina's department charged with collecting the unauthorized substance tax, only 77 folks have voluntarily come forward since 1990. Most of them are thought to be stamp collectors.
The majority of the $78.3 million the state has collected thus far has come from those who got busted and were found without stamps.
But even if they had had stamps, it's not like their legal troubles would be over. "Purchasing stamps only fulfills your civil unauthorized substance tax obligation," according to the N.C. DOR Web site.
Excuse me, I just purchased 2 pounds of dope, how much is the tax on that?