Ohio Capital Journal
Ohio Republicans seem to think that they are still negotiating over legal cannabis.
Ohioans voted overwhelmingly last month in favor of the initiated statute that legalized recreational cannabis, Issue 2. Now the state’s GOP, having failed to turn out its own base to vote down the statute, is trying to get its story straight on legal weed.
Their latest gambit seems to center on misdirection. Initially, Ohio Senate Republicans aggressively pushed back against the will of the voters, trail-ballooning legislative changes to the policy that would have eliminated the right for Ohioans to grow their own cannabis, a key provision of Issue 2, and re-criminalized possession of cannabis that wasn’t obtained from licensed retailers, which could not open for at least one year.
Then, in a seemingly dramatic reversal, they back-tracked on that posture. Maybe they began to listen to their constituents. For whatever reason, they added an expungement provision that has been long favored by advocates, crafted new language that would permit medical cannabis dispensaries to sell recreational cannabis as soon as 90 days after passage, and kept the home-grow provision intact. On Thursday, that bill sailed through the GOP-controlled Ohio Senate, which now goes to the GOP-controlled House. I expect the House will pass it and that it will be signed into law by Gov. Mike DeWine.
It’s tempting to view these provisions as a positive — as an acceleration of recreational cannabis legalization, which voters overwhelmingly favored. Hardly anybody in the activist community thought expungement was realistic at this point because Ohio’s initiated statutes are limited in scope, and allowing existing medical dispensaries to sell cannabis to recreational consumers wasn’t in Issue 2’s scope, either.
Allowing existing medical dispensaries to sell recreational cannabis is a genuinely good policy that would prevent cannabis businesses and consumers from operating in regulatory no-man’s land for another year. Generally, when recreational legalization occurs at the state level, recreational dispensaries need to be permitted to open where there is demand for them. Otherwise, the black market will prevail in the absence of a fully functional legal marketplace.
So, accelerated adult-use sales and expungement seem like great wins. But beyond that, the positives are largely an illusion.
The expungement provision is confusing and may not be very effective. All the Senate-passed bill says is that the Ohio attorney general shall create a process to reimburse people for costs associated with proactively petitioning the court for expungement of prior convictions involving cannabis possession. Expungement does not seem to be automatic, and if this is the language that passes into law, then there will be many people in Ohio who believe they’ve been cleared when they really haven’t been.
We will gladly raise our hands and help the Ohio Senate write an expungement policy that really expunges the records of the state’s victims of a century of cannabis prohibition, which has always been racist, unfair, and ineffective.
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The Ohio Senate Republican bill on legal cannabis is a trick
