Tag: legalized marijuana

Ohio GOP Leaders Claim Bill To Roll Back Marijuana Legalization Law Doesn’t Disrespect Voters

Ohio’s Senate president is pushing back against criticism of a bill that would scale back parts of a voter-approved marijuana legalization law, claiming that the legislation does not disrespect the will of the electorate and would have little impact on products available in stores.

“My definitive message is: If you want to go purchase marijuana products from a licensed dispensary, that is going to be unchanged by Senate Bill 56,” Senate President Rob McColley (R) said on a podcast posted on Friday. “The only difference you’ll notice is the packaging may not look as appealing to children, but you’ll still be able to buy the same products.”

McColley was speaking on a The President’s Podcast, produced and published by Ohio Senate Republicans. He and host John Fortney, the communications director for the Senate GOP caucus, spent the first half of the podcast defending SB 56, which would amend the cannabis law passed by voters in November 2023.

Among other changes, the bill would halve the number of plants that adults could grow, add new criminal penalties around cannabis conduct and remove select social equity provisions in the law.

The Senate approved the proposal on a 23–9 vote last week.

Critics, such as Sen. Bill DeMora (D), who spoke against the measures on the Senate floor, contend that the plan “goes against the will of the voters and will kill the adult industry in Ohio.”

Fortney began the podcast by acknowledging “a lot of controversy around Senate Bill 56,” asserting that “all it did was preserve access to what the voters approved in November of 2023, the initiated marijuana statute, and put some safety and security parameters around it for—of all things, Mr. President—children.”

“The far left, the Democrat narrative, the narrative of the legacy media, has been, ‘Republicans are trying to take away what the voters approved,’ which is patently false,” Fortney continued. “What a lie.”

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Washington Lawmakers Once Again Abandon Effort To Allow Adults To Grow Marijuana At Home

Democrats in the Washington State legislature have once again given up on a plan to legalize home cultivation of marijuana for personal use, opting instead to keep the conduct classified as a felony.

Lawmakers in the House Appropriations Committee did not act on the homegrow bill—HB 1449, from Rep. Shelley Kloba—before a legislative deadline on Friday, meaning it’s now dead for the session.

If enacted law, the bill would have allowed adults 21 and older to grow up to six cannabis plants at home for personal use, with households capped at 15 plants regardless of how many adults reside on the premises. People could also lawfully keep the marijuana produced by those plants despite the state’s existing one-ounce limit on possession.

Kloba and other supportive lawmakers have worked for nearly a decade to pass a law allowing adults to grow a small number of cannabis plants for their own use, but each year, other lawmakers and executive agencies have stood in the way of the proposal.

Kloba’s staff on Friday confirmed to Marijuana Moment that the bill would not move forward this year, saying that the lawmaker “will continue pursuing this policy” but declining to comment further.

Last year, Kloba sponsored HB 2194, which similarly died after not being called for a vote in the House Appropriations Committee.

After last year’s proposal failed to advance, Kloba similarly said she would continue to pursue the reform.

“Every session has its own character and constraints, which so far have meant that the bill has not advanced to the Senate,” she told Marijuana Moment at the time. “But I am not giving up.”

Washington was one of the first U.S. states to legalize adult-use marijuana, passing a ballot initiative in 2012. Growing marijuana for personal use without a state medical card, however, remains a Class C felony, carrying up to five years in prison and up to $10,000 in fines.

Legislative efforts to allow personal cultivation stretch back to at least 2015, but so far each has failed.

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Minnesota Lawmakers, Cities And Businesses Raise Alarm Over State’s Pending Marijuana Contracts With Tribal Nations

People interested in the recreational cannabis market who are not Gov. Tim Walz (DFL) or leaders of the state’s tribal nations have been asking when, where and how they can present their views on imminent state-tribal cannabis compacts.

The answer is: They can’t. The pending compacts that are now expected to allow the state’s tribal nations to enter the legal cannabis business outside of their reservations will not be made public until they are signed by Walz and the tribes. Once signed, they would be the first state-tribal cannabis compacts in the U.S. to allow tribal enterprises to operate outside of reservation lands, and they can’t be amended without mutual agreement.

That leaves lawmakers, local governments and potential cannabis business people to raise issues publicly with little expectation that they will be considered by state negotiators. Walz endorsed the basic tenets of the deal—that the tribes would get a large chunk of the off-reservation market and be allowed to open their stores well before non-tribal stores can open.

“They’re great partners in this. They know how to do this,” Walz said. “Many of them are ahead, obviously enough to set up for them and their sovereignty, to be cultivating. So I think we’re in good shape, and I think they’ll be executed in the near future. And I think that’s the first step in a broader market that is going to be big, and it’ll shake itself out over time.”

He said having tribal stores open first “lets us get out there.”

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New Jersey Governor Proposes Marijuana Tax Hike

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) wants to hike a special tax on cannabis from $2.50 to $15 an ounce to fund social service and violence intervention programs with tens of millions of dollars in new revenue.

“In just five years, cannabis has gone from destroying lives—in the form of excessive criminal sentences—to helping save lives,” Murphy said in his budget address Tuesday.

Murphy’s plan comes about two months after the state Cannabis Regulatory Commission hiked the tax from $1.24 to $2.50 an ounce in December.

The tax, known as the social equity excise fee, is paid by cannabis cultivators. The money goes to a dedicated fund for social equity programs and investing in communities hurt by marijuana prohibition, and another portion is allocated to programs to divert youth from cannabis.

As of August 2024, the tax has brought in more than $6 million, which is all sitting unspent, according to the cannabis agency. That money must be allocated by the Legislature and governor under the state’s cannabis legalization law.

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Ohio Senators Approve Bill To Scale Back Voter-Approved Marijuana Legalization Law By Reducing Home Grow And Adding New Penalties

An Ohio Senate committee has approved a bill to make significant changes to the state’s voter-approved marijuana law—by halving the number of plants adults could grow, adding certain criminal penalties and removing select social equity provisions, among other revisions.

On Wednesday, the Senate General Government Committee passed the legislation from Sen. Steve Huffman (R) in a 5-2 vote, sending it to the Rules and Reference Committee to prepare it for a full Senate vote that come come as early as Wednesday afternoon.

This comes about a week after the panel held a hearing on the proposal, taking testimony and adopting a substitute version. On Wednesday, the panel adopted an additional substitute that would clarify that THC limits per package don’t apply to products intended for combustion, prevent people with felony convictions from obtaining a marijuana license and restore the ability of level two cultivators to expand their operations to 15,000 square feet.

In its initial form, the bill would have raised the state’s excise tax on marijuana products from 10 percent to 15 percent and also changed how taxes are redistributed to local governments. But those tax provisions were removed at the previous hearing in light of separate plans to adjust the tax rate in broader budget legislation.

Democratic members of the committee offered a series of amendments, several of which sought to dial back some of the proposed changes to the voter-approved law. All were defeated by the panel’s Republican majority, however.

For example, the substitute approved in committee would lower the maximum household plant limit for home cultivation from 12 to six. An amendment was offered to “compromise” by raising that to nine.

Huffman made the motion to table that amendment, saying that “this bill is all about being reasonable and appropriate,” and the legislation “initially started with two plants, and we compromised up to six and I believe that continuing as six is reasonable and appropriate.”

Under current law as approved by voters in 2023, adults can grow up to 12 cannabis plants at home.

Reform advocates oppose the legislation because, in addition to halving the home cultivation limit, they say it would recriminalize the sharing of cannabis between adults, smoking or vaping in someone’s own back yard and transporting unopened edibles in a vehicle. It also would eliminate non-discrimination protections to ensure cannabis consumers aren’t denied child custody, access to medical care and public benefits.

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Ohio GOP Lawmakers Introduce Bill To Raise Marijuana Tax, Restrict Home Grow And Eliminate Social Equity Funding

Ohio Republican lawmakers are reviving an effort to significantly alter the state’s voter-approved marijuana legalization law—in part by raising the tax on cannabis products, halving the number of plants adults could grow and eliminating certain social equity provisions.

While GOP leadership has generally pledged that they will not seek to repeal the marijuana law altogether, a newly filed bill from Sen. Steve Huffman (R)—which the Senate president signaled he supports—would make major changes that substantially depart from the provisions of the initiative that voters strongly approved in 2023.

Among the proposed revisions, the bill would increase the excise tax on marijuana from 10 percent to 15 percent. And rather than have revenue allocated to specific areas supporting social equity and jobs programs, local governments that permit marijuana businesses, education and substance misuse initiatives and more, all revenue would instead go to the state general fund.

Senate President Rob McColley (R) told The Columbus Dispatch that legislators intend to discuss possible disbursements of that revenue this session, but he said he’s aligned with the bill sponsor on the idea of increasing the tax rate for cannabis.

“There’s an awful lot of societal costs that are going to have to be borne by the legalization of marijuana,” he said.

Under Huffman’s bill, adults would only be able to grow up to six plants, rather than 12, for personal use. It would also decrease the THC content cap from 90 percent to 70 percent.

Further, the proposal would limit the number of dispensaries to 350, while requiring all licensed retailers to serve both adult-use consumers and medical cannabis patients. The state Division of Cannabis Control (DCC) would also no longer be required to establish rules allowing for marijuana deliveries and online purchases.

GOP lawmakers considered a variety of potential amendments to the marijuana law in the weeks after voters passed the ballot initiative, and this latest attempt is likely to see similar pushback.

Sen. Bill DeMora (D) said during a committee hearing on Wednesday that the proposal effectively amounts to legislators telling voters: “Screw you, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You passed it with an overwhelming majority in the state, but we know better than they did what they were voting on.”

Huffman, the bill sponsor, said the legislation is not meant to “do away with the ballot initiative.”

“It’s to work around the edges to make it better,” he said.

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Analysis: Steep Declines in Teen Marijuana Use in States With Regulated Cannabis Markets

Marijuana use by teens has fallen sharply in the majority of states that have legalized the adult-use market, according to an analysis of state and federal survey data by the Marijuana Policy Project.

MPP’s analysis acknowledges steady declines in self-reported marijuana use by young people in 19 of 21 states for which data is available. Federally funded survey data shows similar nationwide declines in teen marijuana use over the past decade.

“Over a decade into state-level cannabis legalization, the data is unequivocal: Legalization does not increase youth cannabis use. In fact, evidence suggests the opposite,” said Karen O’Keefe, Director of State Policies at the Marijuana Policy Project. “By transitioning cannabis sales from the illicit market to a regulated system with age-restricted access, we’ve seen a decrease in youth cannabis use.”

Last month, national data provided by the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future study reported that marijuana use by teens fell to historic lows in 2024. Specifically, it determined that the percentage of 8th graders, 10th graders, and 12 graders who reported having ever consumed cannabis declined 32 percent, 37 percent, and 23 percent since 2014.

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In 2024, 11 states surpassed $1 billion in legal marijuana sales.

Collectively, these states accounted for a large majority of the $23.2 billion sold across the 21 states with operational recreational markets.

California led the pack with $4.2 billion in sales, followed by Michigan, which brought in $3.1 billion. Illinois ($1.8 billion) and Massachusetts ($1.75 billion) also contributed significantly to the billion-dollar club. Other high-performing states included Colorado ($1.35 billion), Missouri ($1.36 billion), and Arizona ($1.21 billion).

Maryland, Washington, and New Jersey each reported $1.1 billion in revenue. Meanwhile, New York, in its first full year of sales, reached $1 billion, demonstrating its potential to eventually become one of the largest marijuana markets in the nation.

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NY coffers hit new high from marijuana tax receipts: ‘It’s extraordinary’

New York’s coffers are starting to get a financial high from marijuana sales after a slow start.

The Empire State is expected to generate $161.8 million in tax revenues from its legal weed business for the fiscal year ending March 31 — or four times what it raked in last year.

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s budget released last week also projects generating $248 million in revenue from the state-licensed cannabis industry for the next fiscal year running from April 1 to March 31, 2026.

That’s a lot of green — up from $43.3 million raised in 2022-2023 amid a fitful rollout of the program.

State budget officials predict the revenues will then grow to $339 million in FY 2027, $363 million in 2028 and $374 million by 2029, based on expansion of the legal market.

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Trump’s New DEA Head Says Marijuana Is A ‘Gateway Drug’ That Causes Psychosis And Other Mental Health Problems

The official named to run the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as acting administrator subscribes to the “gateway drug” theory for marijuana and believes most people living in states that have legalized cannabis will continue to obtain it from illicit sources such as cartels due to high taxes in regulated markets.

As the Trump administration takes shape, marijuana reform advocates and stakeholders are getting to learn more about the newly announced acting administrator, Derek Maltz. And so far, a review of his record has done little to assure the cannabis community that he would serve as an ally in the push for reform at DEA.

Maltz, who retired from the agency in 2014 after 28 years of service, has made a series of sensational comments about cannabis—at one point linking marijuana use to school shootings, for example. But he evidently also holds a more common prohibitionist position: He thinks cannabis is a gateway to harder drugs, despite numerous studies contradicting that theory.

“Marijuana is not the marijuana from the 70s or the 80s or the 90s. This is higher, pure-THC marijuana,” he said during an interview with NTD at a Turning Point USA event last year. “I’ve talked to doctors about this. It’s actually causing psychosis, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety—so it’s really a gateway drug for these kids that don’t know any better.”

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