Washington State lawmakers have advanced a bill to expand the state’s voter-approved marijuana legalization law by allowing recreational consumers to grow their own cannabis plants.
Weeks after Sens. Rebecca Saldaña (D), Noel Frame (D) and T’wina Nobles (D) filed the legislation, the Senate Labor & Commerce Committee on Tuesday approved the measure in a voice vote. It next heads to the Senate Rules Committee before potentially reaching the floor.
The vote comes about a week after the Senate panel held an initial hearing on the proposal, with law enforcement representatives voicing opposition to the reform and military veterans testifying in support of allowing personal home cultivation.
Under SB 6204, adults over 21 years of age would be allowed to cultivate up to six marijuana plants at home. No more than 15 cannabis plants could be produced at any one time in a single housing unit, regardless of how many adults live there.
People could lawfully keep the marijuana produced by those plants despite the state’s existing one-ounce limit on possession.
Property owners would be allowed to prohibit tenants from growing cannabis in rental units, and probation and parole officers would be able to bar people from cultivating marijuana as a condition of their supervised release.
Home cultivators would be required to keep plants from public view and grown in such a way that they could not be smelled from public places or private properties of other housing units. Violating those rules would be a class 3 civil infraction.
It would be a class 1 civil infraction for a person to grow more than six but fewer than 16 cannabis plants, while it would be a class C felony to produce more than 16 plants, under the bill.
No cannabis plants could be grown in housing units that are used to provide early childhood education and early learning services by a family day care provider.
The committee on Tuesday approved an amendment from Sen. Mark Schoesler (R) to allow municipalities and counties to ban or enact moratoriums on cannabis cultivation in housing units in areas that are zoned primarily for residential use.
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