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If Ohio Voters Pass Marijuana Legalization Measure, Senate President Says He’ll Push For ‘Reviewing It And Repealing Things’
As early voting in Ohio kicked off this week, Republican state senators passed a resolution urging residents to reject an adult-use marijuana legalization initiative on the November ballot. But if the cannabis reform measure passes, Senate President Matt Huffman (R) also warned that GOP lawmakers may seek to scuttle some of its core components.
If Ohio voters approve Issue 2, he said during a speech on the Senate floor this week, “this initiated statute is coming right back before this body.”
“We’re going to have a mental health crisis on our hands,” if legalization becomes law, Huffman cautioned. “We are going to pay for this for years and years and years, and it’s only going to get worse.”
Huffman later clarified to local reporters that he wouldn’t seek to repeal the legalization plan entirely if it’s approved by voters, saying that he would instead “advocate for reviewing it and repealing things or changing things that are in it.”
He specified that he’s concerned about some of the measure’s provisions, including one that would funnel put a portion of state tax revenue from legal marijuana toward financial assistance and technical support for people who apply for cannabis business licenses under the initiative’s social equity program.
In his speech to colleagues, however, the Senate president took aim squarely at legalization.
“If Issue 2 passes, there will be more teenagers in the state of Ohio committing suicide,” he warned. “And our reaction to that will not be, ‘Let’s make marijuana illegal,’ because by that time, more people will be making lots of money. It will be, ‘Maybe we should hire drug counselors, get into the schools, talk about kids not taking drugs.’ But by then it will be too late. It’ll be even more part of our culture. And no, I’m not a scientist, but I’m a person who can look at facts and listen to scientists and know that that’s true.”
“If it’s in your home, if people can purchase it for you, if adults can purchase it for you,” he added, “children are going to have this more often.”
Ohio Senate Urges Voters To Oppose Marijuana Legalization On The Ballot, Citing Anti-Drug Talking Points
As early voting kicked off in Ohio on Wednesday, the state Senate passed a GOP-led resolution urging voters to reject a marijuana legalization measure that’s on the ballot.
Introduced by Sens. Mark Romanchuk (R) and Terry Johnson (R), and cosponsored by 14 other Senate Republicans, SR 216 lists a parade of horribles that lawmakers say would befall the state if the cannabis ballot initiative known as Issue 2 becomes law.
“The proposed statute authored by the commercial marijuana industry,” it says, “does not serve the best interests of the people of Ohio, will bring unacceptable threats and risks to the health of all Ohioans, especially children, will create dangers in the workplace and unacceptable challenges and costs to employers, will make Ohio’s roads more dangerous, will impose significant new, unfunded costs to Ohio’s public social services, and serves only to advance the financial interests of the commercial marijuana industry and its investors.”
Nearly three in five state voters said they support adult-use legalization in a poll commissioned by the campaign and published late last month. That’s consistent with the results of other recent independent surveys.
The Senate’s dire warnings, which do not cite any supporting data, represent a selective reading of the available evidence around marijuana legalization.
The resolution asserts, for example, that marijuana “is a ‘gateway’ drug, and research shows that four out of ten regular marijuana users go on to experiment with other drugs,” claiming—apparently inaccurately—that drug overdoses “have been the leading cause of injury and death in Ohio” since 2007. It says that “33,000 Ohioans have died of drug overdoses between 2011 and 2020.”
According to Ohio’s Department of Health, however, COVID-19 has so far killed more than 42,000 people in the state.
North Dakota senator Doug Larsen and his wife and two kids die in plane crash
North Dakota senator Doug Larsen, as well as his wife and two kids, have died in a plane crash.
The small plane they were travelling in crashed in Utah, a Senate leader said Monday. Doug Larsen’s death was confirmed in an email that Republican Senate Majority Leader David Hogue sent to his fellow senators.
The plane crashed Sunday evening shortly after taking off from Canyonlands Airfield about 15 miles (24 kilometers) north of Moab, according to a Grand County Sheriff’s Department statement posted on Facebook. The sheriff’s office said all four people on board the plane were killed.
“Senator Doug Larsen, his wife Amy, and their two young children died in a plane crash last evening in Utah,” Hogue wrote in his email. “They were visiting family in Scottsdale and returning home. They stopped to refuel in Utah.”
“I’m not sure where the bereavement starts with such a tragedy, but I think it starts with prayers for the grandparents, surviving stepchild of Senator Larsen, and extended family of Doug and Amy,” Hogue wrote. “Hold your family close today.”
The crash of the single-engine Piper plane was being investigated, the National Transportation Safety Board said in a post on X, the social media website formerly called Twitter.
No, Mike Pence, We Should Not Make It Easier To Execute Mass Shooters
During last night’s Republican presidential debate, former Vice President Mike Pence had a startling answer to a question about what he would do to reduce gun violence.
“I am sick and tired of these mass shootings happening in the United States of America,” said Pence. “And if I’m president of the United States, I’m going to go to the Congress of the United States, and we’re going to pass a federal expedited death penalty for anyone involved in a mass shooting so that they will meet their fate in months, not years. It is unconscionable that the Parkland shooter…is actually going to spend the rest of his life behind bars in Florida. That’s not justice. We have to mete out justice and send a message to these would-be killers that you are not going to live out your days behind bars. You’re going to meet justice.”
This plan is not just unlikely to reduce mass shootings; it would leave lots of accused criminals without important procedural protections. While “mass shooting” doesn’t have a set legal definition, one common definition puts it as any shooting with at least four victims, including people who were injured rather than killed. By that metric, over 3,500 mass shootings occurred from 2015 to 2022. Roughly 95 percent of these shootings resulted in fewer than four deaths, according to Everytown for Gun Safety’s data. That includes a lot of crimes that do not look like Parkland—crimes in which there could be serious doubts about whether the accused is in fact guilty.
The cannabis industry’s arch nemesis reemerged this week
Cannabis investors have been waiting for movement on the SAFE Banking Act, which would free up large banking institutions to provide industry players with much-needed loans and other banking services, for years.
Next week was supposed to be a big milestone in the political process as September 27 was seen as a strong tentative date for a Senate vote on the bill.
The SAFE Banking Act could save the fledgling U.S. cannabis industry from being crushed by the hard ceiling of lack of banking access as it grows larger.
In the past, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has pushed to include the SAFE Banking Act into a larger funding packages in order to get it passed, to no avail.
And while the bill has garnered bipartisan support — especially in the House of Representatives — Senate Republicans seem hellbent on slowing up the industry’s progress.
Senators Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.) have filed new legislation that would prevent federal agencies from rescheduling cannabis without congressional approval.
The Deferring Executive Authority Act was introduced on Thursday by Lummis and Daines, who opposed marijuana being legalized in her own state.
“Congress makes the laws in this country, not D.C. bureaucrats,” said Lummis. “The American people through their elected representatives in the Senate and House should have the final say on such a momentous change as the legalization of marijuana.
14 GOP Congressional Lawmakers Tell DEA To Keep Marijuana In Schedule I And ‘Reject’ Top Health Agency’s Recommendation
A coalition of 14 Republican congressional lawmakers is urging the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to “reject” the top federal health agency’s recommendation to reschedule marijuana and instead keep it in the most restrictive category under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).
In a letter sent to DEA Administrator Anne Milgram on Monday, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) and Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) led a dozen other colleagues in both chambers in arguing that any decision to reschedule cannabis “should be based on proven facts and science—not popular opinion, changes in state laws, or the preferred policy of an administration.”
Of course, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has repeatedly emphasized that its review into marijuana scheduling, directed by President Joe Biden late last year, was science-based. And after 11 months of investigation, it has recommended that marijuana be placed in Schedule III. Milgram has also made clear that DEA’s review will follow the science.
The eight GOP senators and six House members evidently distrust the motives behind the HHS recommendation, however, and they argued in the letter, first reported by The Washington Stand, that the current “research, science, and trends support the case that marijuana should remain a Schedule I drug.”
They pointed to National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) data on rates of cannabis use disorder and raised concerns about increased THC potency of marijuana products, stating that these “facts indicate that marijuana has a high potential for abuse and that the risk is only increasing.” For what it’s worth, NIDA also reportedly signed off the HHS rescheduling recommendation before it was sent to DEA.
GOP Guv Spent Millions in Tax Dollars on Governor’s Mansion Upgrades
After Republican Tate Reeves was elected governor of Mississippi in 2019, he sold his home and moved his family, naturally, into the governor’s mansion.
But that new home, a national historic landmark, was far from perfect for Reeves. And over the last three and a half years, while not having to pay personal property taxes on his new state-owned mansion, Reeves plowed more than $2.4 million in taxpayer dollars into renovations and upkeep for his temporary home, according to public records obtained by The Daily Beast.
During Reeves’ brief stay, the governor’s mansion has also seen what appears to be an additional $900,000 in renovations, restoration, and refurbishments. Those investments, however, came courtesy of anonymous donors, and appear in federal tax records filed by the Governors Mansion Foundation—a nonprofit whose board features Reeves’ campaign treasurer and a top campaign donor who runs a controversial installment loan business.
That would mean that, in the years since he stopped paying property taxes on his old home, Reeves has put a total of $3.3 million into updating the mansion. His former home, which Reeves sold in July 2020, was last listed for $629,000, according to several real estate websites. In the time since Reeves was first elected lieutenant governor—2012—Mississippi property taxes have increased by about 7.2 percent, according to state data.
GOP Congressman’s Bill Would Cut Federal Funding For States And Tribes That Legalize Marijuana
Legislation introduced on Friday by a North Carolina congressman seeks to slash a portion of federal funding to individual U.S. states as well as Native tribes that legalize marijuana.
The so-called Stop Pot Act, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC), would withhold 10 percent of federal highway funding to jurisdictions “in which the purchase or public possession of marijuana for recreational purposes is lawful.” Introduction of the bill comes less than a week before a tribe in Edwards’s home state votes on an adult-use marijuana legalization referendum.
Edwards argues that state and tribal laws allowing cannabis use by adults are an affront to U.S. law.
“The laws of any government should not infringe on the overall laws of our nation, and federal funds should not be awarded to jurisdictions that willfully ignore federal law,” he said in a press release. “During a time when our communities are seeing unprecedented crime, drug addiction, and mental illness, the Stop Pot Act will help prevent even greater access to drugs and ease the strain placed on our local law enforcement and mental health professionals who are already stretched thin.”
Hellbound and Down 
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