Tag: marijuana legalization

Virginia GOP Governor Vetoes Marijuana Sales Legalization Bill

After sending messages for months that he had no interest in moving forward with Democratic-led plans to legalize retail marijuana sales in Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) has now formally vetoed legal sales legislation sent to him by lawmakers about a month ago.

In a veto message issued on Thursday, the governor wrote that “the proposed legalization of retail marijuana in the Commonwealth endangers Virginians’ health and safety.”

“States following this path have seen adverse effects on children’s and adolescent’s health and safety, increased gang activity and violent crime, significant deterioration in mental health, decreased road safety, and significant costs associated with retail marijuana that far exceed tax revenue,” he claimed. “It also does not eliminate the illegal black-market sale of cannabis, nor guarantee product safety. Addressing the inconsistencies in enforcement and regulation in Virginia’s current laws does not justify expanding access to cannabis, following the failed paths of other states and endangering Virginians’ health and safety.”

Even before the legislative session kicked off this year, some supporters predicted Youngkin would veto any legal sales measure that arrived on his desk on principle, regardless of what provisions it contained. Others believed it was possible to craft a broadly appealing bill that could either win the governor’s approval or secure enough bipartisan support to overcome a potential veto.

Ultimately, however, votes for the legislation fell mostly along party lines, suggesting that Youngkin’s veto will likely stand because there isn’t enough support to override him in the Senate or House of Delegates.

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DeSantis Has A ‘Big Problem’ With Florida Marijuana Ballot Measure, Citing ‘Smells’ In Other Places That Have Legalized

With the Florida Supreme Court weighing whether to allow an adult-use marijuana legalization measure to be on November’s ballot, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Friday reiterated his stance against the policy change, complaining that letting adults legally consume cannabis could impact businesses and communities—including as the result of odor.

“I’ve gone to some of these cities that have had this everywhere, it smells, there’s all these things,” he told reporters, complaining that the proposal wouldn’t give government officials enough power to control when and where marijuana businesses operate—a claim backers of the initiative deny.

“I don’t want to be able to go walk in front of shops and have this, I don’t want every hotel to really smell,” he added, “I don’t want all these things. But if you’re saying you can’t regulate it or you can’t limit it—which, that’s how I read that—that could be a big, big problem.”

Despite his opposition to the initiative, DeSantis, the former GOP presidential candidate who dropped out of the race in January, has predicted that the state’s highest court will ultimately allow the measure on November’s ballot.

“I think the court is going to approve that,” the governor said at his final campaign event in New Hampshire earlier this year, “so it’ll be on the ballot.”

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UN Body Reaffirms That Marijuana Legalization Violates International Treaties, While Addressing Germany Cannabis Reform And U.S. Psychedelics Movement

The United Nations’s (UN) drug control body is reiterating that it considers legalizing marijuana for non-medical or scientific purposes a violation of international treaties, though it also said it appreciates that Germany’s government scaled back its cannabis plan ahead of a recent vote. The global narcotics agency is also taking note of the psychedelics policy reform movement in U.S. states.

This is mostly par for the course for the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), which has routinely criticized countries for allowing the enactment of cannabis legalization due to their obligations under various Single Convention treaties going back to 1961. But as Germany entered the fold, and the U.S. has continued to move toward marijuana and psychedelics reform, the body is again making its disappointment known.

INCB’s 2023 annual report, which was published on Tuesday, “underscores” that member nations are required to “take such legislative and administrative measures as may be necessary” to criminalize “the production, manufacture, export, import, distribution of, trade in, use and possession of drugs” such as marijuana under decades-old treaty agreements.

“The Board continues to reiterate its concern regarding the legalization of the use of cannabis for non-medical and non-scientific purposes in several jurisdictions, with other jurisdictions considering similar action,” it said.

To that point, INCB also included a recommendation in the latest report to recall an analysis from its 2022 report that, at one point, suggested that the U.S. is out of compliance with drug treaty obligations because the federal government is passively allowing states within the country to legalize marijuana.

“The apparent tension between these provisions and the trend towards legalization must be addressed by the signatories to the three drug control conventions,” it said.

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Is The Government Finally Abandoning Its Anti-Science Stance On Marijuana?

Hundreds of pages of recently released documents provided by the Department of Health and Services affirm what the overwhelming majority of the public has known for decades: Marijuana is therapeutically useful. And its harms are not on par with those of heroin—which federal regulations currently consider it akin to—or even alcohol.

Those were the explicit conclusions of the nation’s top federal health agency, along with the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in a letter calling on the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to remove “botanical cannabis” from its Schedule I prohibitive status in the federal Controlled Substances Act.

By definition, Schedule I substances are federally criminalized because they possess “no currently accepted medical use in the United States,” a “high potential for abuse” and “lack accepted safety under medical supervision.” Since 1970, Congress and other federal bureaucracies have insisted cannabis remain in this strict category. But now the nation’s top federal health agencies are changing their tune.

Health and Human Services, which was tasked by the Biden administration in 2022 to review the federal designation of cannabis, based its conclusions in part on the real-world experiences of over “30,000 health care practitioners authorized to recommend marijuana” under state law and the more than 6 million state-registered cannabis patients they serve.

“The vast majority of individuals who use marijuana are doing so in a manner that does not lead to dangerous outcomes to themselves or others,” the agency concluded. “No safety concerns were identified in our review that would indicate that the medical use of marijuana poses unacceptably high safety risks for the indications where there is some credible scientific evidence supporting its therapeutic use.”

Department officials added, “The risks to the public health posed by marijuana are low compared to other drugs of abuse,” such as benzodiazepines—a Schedule IV drug—or alcohol, which isn’t scheduled at all.

Of course, the public has long been aware of this reality. Thirty-eight states regulate medical cannabis access and 24 states—home to 53 percent of the U.S. population—have legalized adult-use marijuana markets. Most of these statewide policy changes were enacted by voters at the ballot box.

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Germany’s Parliament Approves Marijuana Legalization Bill

Germany’s parliament has officially approved a bill to legalize marijuana nationwide.

Two days after the cannabis legislation was considered by eight committees of the Bundestag, the full body voted 407-226 on final passage on Friday.

The bill—which will make possession and home cultivation legal and authorize social clubs that can distribute marijuana to members—now heads to the Bundesrat, a separate legislative chamber that represents German states, though its members cannot stop the reform from being enacted.

While supporters have said legalization would take effect in April if it’s enacted, there are new questions about that timeline. The Bundesrat may move to refer the legislation to a mediation committee to address criminal justice-related implications of the law, which could mean several months of additional discussion.

The floor vote comes weeks after leaders of Germany’s so-called traffic light coalition government announced that they’d reached a final agreement on the legalization bill, resolving outstanding concerns, primarily from the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

Health Minister Karl Lauterbach, who has for months been the government’s lead on the cannabis plan, said ahead of the floor vote that the country is “fundamentally changing our cannabis control policy in order to combat the black market.”

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Pennsylvania Governor Says Lawmakers ‘Don’t Even Have A Choice’ But To Legalize Marijuana As Other States Move Ahead

Pennsylvania’s governor says he thinks officials in the state “don’t even have a choice anymore” on legalizing marijuana, and he feels there’s bipartisan momentum that lawmakers should leverage to get the job done.

With neighboring states such as Ohio enacting legalization in recent years, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) said last week that “this really comes down to an issue now of competitiveness,” as the state is currently “losing out on 250 million bucks a year in revenue that could go to anything from economic development, education, you name it.”

“The reality is, as long as we have safeguards in place to make sure our children aren’t getting their hands on it—it’s just like, we don’t want our kids out drinking, right?” he said. “And a lot of that is going to be a burden on parents and schools and others to make sure we educate on that. Then I think this is something we’ve got to compete on.”

“I actually think we don’t even have a choice anymore given the way in which this is moving so quickly across our region and across the country,” Shapiro told WILK News Radio, adding that he’s personally “evolved on” the issue and wants a legal cannabis market “focused on lifting up Pennsylvania businesses in the process—not these big national conglomerates—and we’re empowering people in local communities to it that I think some good can come from it.”

The governor made the comments days after unveiling a budget proposal that calls for marijuana legalization to be enacted this year, with sales beginning as early as next January.

Cannabis reform has stalled in the Pennsylvania legislature over recent sessions, but Shapiro said he sees a path forward this year.

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VP Kamala Harris Claims Administration ‘Changed Federal Marijuana Policy’ While Using Incorrect Map Of State Legalization Laws

Vice President Kamala Harris cited the Biden administration’s moves toward reforming federal marijuana laws in a new video appealing to young voters—though her specific claim that policies have already been “changed” is premature. Meanwhile, the video also features a map that purports to highlight states that have legalized cannabis but that contains misinformation about which jurisdictions have actually ended criminalization.

“We changed federal marijuana policy, because nobody should have to go to jail just for smoking weed,” Harris says in the video, posted to X on Friday.

While President Joe Biden has issued mass pardons for people who have committed federal cannabis offenses and initiated a review of marijuana’s federal scheduling status, the clemency move did not free anyone from incarceration and the drug currently remains under Schedule I pending the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) ongoing consideration of a Schedule III recommendation from health officials.

As such, the vice president’s claim that federal marijuana policy has already been “changed” in order to ensure that people aren’t in jail for cannabis is inflated.

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Hawaii Governor Says Legalizing Marijuana Can ‘Blunt’ Negative Effects Of Other ‘Horrible’ Drugs

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green (D) spoke about the state’s path to marijuana legalization this legislative session during an interview this week, calling the policy change a “big social issue that remains” to be addressed in the state and saying he’d likely sign a bill to end cannabis prohibition if one is sent to him by lawmakers.

But Green also said the change “is a little more complicated because the feds have not changed the way they schedule marijuana yet, which is really wacko.”

The governor also pushed back against opponents’ fears that legal cannabis would cause public health problems in the state, saying it could actually bring some benefits.

“I don’t think the sky would fall, honestly, if marijuana were legalized,” Green told Hawaii News Now in an interview that aired on Tuesday, adding: “I also have some thoughts that marijuana might blunt the effect, if you will, of people on these heavy drugs, these horrible drugs.”

Though Hawaii has among the lowest drug overdose death rates in the country, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data, 269 people died of drug overdoses in the state in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available.

Cannabis, by contrast, “is a relative sedative,” the governor said.

“People are far less violent. They are much hungrier, but they—aside from the snacking and stealing Cheetos—will probably do less harm,” he quipped.

Legalization advocates struggled under former Democratic Gov. Dave Ige, who resisted the reform in part because he said he was reluctant to pass something that conflicts with federal law. But since Green took office, activists have felt more emboldened. He’s said since 2022 that he’d sign a legalization bill.

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Ahead Of Legalization Vote, Florida Senate Panel OKs Proposal To Limit THC In Adult-Use Marijuana Products

Florida’s Senate Committee on Health Policy advanced a bill on Tuesday that would preemptively limit THC levels in adult-use marijuana products. The change would restrict products allowed under a recreational cannabis legalization ballot initiative that organizers are working to put on November’s ballot.

The bill, SPB 7050, would prohibit dispensary sales of marijuana flower with a potency of greater than 30 percent THC. All other cannabis products would be limited to 60 percent THC. It would also set a serving size on edible products of 10 milligrams THC or less, with the total amount per package no more than 200 mg.

“This is setting the stage and recognizing that should the amendment pass—should it be on the ballot and should the amendment pass—that we will continue to have a medical marijuana market and we would have a personal use market,” said Sen. Colleen Burton (R), who chairs the committee and who spoke in favor of the committee’s proposed THC limit bill. “The potencies and quantities that you see in the recommended language today are based upon keeping that separate.”

As more states have legalized marijuana and highly concentrated THC products become more widely available, some have raised concerns about apparent associations between high-THC products and mental health problems, especially in developing brains.

On the House side, that chamber’s Healthcare Regulation Subcommittee last week advanced a bill, HB 1269 from Rep. Ralph Massullo (R), that would set the same preemptive THC limits on recreational marijuana.

At Tuesday’s Senate panel hearing, Sen. Gayle Harrell (R) referenced studies indicating an association between high THC cannabis products and mental health issues like psychosis and schizophrenia, especially in youth.

“When I look at the medical evidence out there and the dangerous impact that high-potency THC has, it is overwhelming,” she argued, adding: “I can tell you, the high risk of schizophrenia is sixfold with high levels of THC.”

Other members expressed mixed feelings on the bill. Sen. Rosalind Osgood (D), who said she was 13 when she smoked her first joint—a decision she said led her to “be on the streets, homeless, with other addictions”—said she supports limiting the strength of mind-altering substances.

But rather than take up THC levels in the standalone measure, she said, “I would have preferred to have this bill at another time, after voters have made a decision, to comprehensively look at all the different arms that go toward this.”

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Senators Tell DEA To Fully Legalize Marijuana, Demanding Answers On Rescheduling Process

Twelve senators are calling on the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to fully legalize cannabis and answer questions about the agency’s ongoing scheduling review.

In a letter sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland and DEA Administrator Anne Milgram on Monday, the lawmakers—led by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and John Fetterman (D-PA), along with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and other champions of marijuana reform—denounced the “devastating impact” and “out of step” policy of prohibition, arguing that cannabis should be fully removed from the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

Doing so would present a “rare opportunity to shape the new cannabis industry from the ground up, designing a federal regulatory system untainted by the corporate capture that has influenced alcohol and tobacco regulations, and advancing federal cannabis reforms that acknowledge and repair the harms of cannabis criminalization.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has recommended that DEA move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the CSA following a scientific review that concluded cannabis does have therapeutic applications and is less harmful than other controlled substances on lower schedules. DEA makes the final decision, however, and is not bound by the HHS recommendation.

“While rescheduling to Schedule III would mark a significant step forward, it would not resolve the worst harms of the current system,” the senators’ letter, which was first reported by NBC News, says. “Thus, the DEA should deschedule marijuana altogether.”

The lawmakers acknowledged that incremental rescheduling “would have some important policy benefits,” however, such as eliminating barriers to research and federal employment for medical cannabis patients, as well as allowing state-licensed marijuana businesses to take federal tax deductions that they’re currently barred from utilizing under the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) code known as 280E.

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