Today is the last day of the Washington State
Legislature’s 2014 session, and the two chambers still
have not come to terms on medical marijuana regulation. It
looks like the
proposed restrictions, including a ban on dispensaries and
lower cultivation and possession limits for patients, are dead
until next year. The hitch is what to do with revenue from taxes on
marijuana sold by the state-licensed stores that are supposed to
start opening this summer. Republicans in the House of
Representatives want local governments to get some of that money.
Although the chamber is controlled by Democrats, they need
Republican votes because revisions to I-502, the marijuana
legalization initiative that voters approved in 2012, require
agreement by two-thirds of legislators until two years have elapsed
since the measure took effect.
Republicans
claim cities and counties deserve a share of the marijuana
taxes because I-502 imposes an unfunded mandate. Given I-502’s
money-saving rationale, that argument does not sit well with
Democrats. “The argument for the initiative was that it’s going to
lower public safety costs, and now they’re saying it’s going to
increase public safety costs with absolutely no data,”
complains House Finance Committee Chairman Reuven Carlyle
(D-Seattle).
More plausibly, Republicans argue that revenue sharing will
encourage local governments to lift
bans and moratoriums on pot shops. “We’ve got to get this
system geographically rolled out across the state in order to be
effective,”
says Rep. Cary Condotta, (R-East Wenatchee). “If you only have
one part of the state participating, the other side is not going to
come over and buy. They’re going to buy from their existing
sources.”
In addition to black-market dealers, those sources include
untaxed, unregulated dispensaries, hundreds of which operate as
“collective gardens” under Washington’s medical marijuana law
(mainly in the western part of the state, where local and federal
officials have been less hostile). A bill
passed by the House last month would have banned dispensaries
as of May 2015; a bill
approved by the Senate on Saturday would have given them four
more months. So even if the legislature had agreed on a final
version, the new pot stores would have faced competition from the
dispensaries for another year or so. If the legislature passes a
bill next year, that period presumably will be extended.
Supporters of the ban say it is necessary to maximize tax
revenue and create a marijuana market that is regulated strictly
enough to avoid federal intervention. Jenny Durkan, the U.S.
attorney for the Western District of Washington, has
warned that a parallel distribution system for medical
marijuana is “not tenable.” That position suggests the failure to
pass legislation this year could prompt a federal crackdown on
dispensaries once the new stores are up and running. “We are
squarely back in the crosshairs of the feds,” says Kari Boiter, a
lobbyist who works with Americans for Safe Access. The Seattle
City Council already has
told the 200 or so dispensaries in that city that they must
close by January 2015 unless they obtain state licenses.
Despite the uncertainty, Steve Sarich of the Cannabis Action
Coalition is celebrating the defeat of new restrictions on medical
marijuana. “We beat back the attack on medical today and defeated
the big money lobbyists hired by the 502 businesses that wanted to
force patients to shop at their recreational stores and turn us
into criminals,” he said in a statement yesterday. “We won’t have
to pay pirate prices for mediocre schwag after all.” He promised
that “we’ll be back with the best medical bill in the country next
January, and we’ve already lined up bipartisan support for it.”
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