ST. PAUL, Minn. (CN) — Minnesota’s Senate has voted to pass a marijuana legalization bill, leaving just two hurdles for the bill before it hits the desk of the state's ganja-supportive Democratic governor.
The Senate’s 34-33 vote in favor of the bill came after just a few hours of debate Friday afternoon, a fight dwarfed by the two-day marathon legislators spent on the Minnesota House’s version of the bill on Tuesday and Wednesday. It is now bound for a conference committee, where legislators will reconcile the differences between the two bills before voting on the compromise version and sending it to Governor Tim Walz, who has said he will sign it.
The Senate’s version of the bill would allow Minnesotans 21 and older to buy – and possess in public – up to two ounces of cannabis flower, eight grams of concentrate and 800 milligrams of edible THC at a time. They would also be able to grow up to eight plants at home, and possess up to five pounds of consumable pot at home – an increase from the House’s version, which would allow only 1.5 pounds. It would also tax cannabis products at 10%, a bump up from the House’s proposed 8% tax.
The bill, passed largely on party lines, was sponsored by Senator Lindsey Port, a Burnsville Democrat. Its goals, she said, were to “legalize, regulate and expunge.”
“The prohibition of cannabis is a failed system that has not achieved the desired goals, and has had incredible costs for our communities, especially communities of color,” Port said while presenting her bill on the floor late Friday morning. “We have an opportunity today to… undo some of the harm that has been done and create a unique system of regulation that works for Minnesota consumers and businesses.”
Both the House and Senate bills create an automatic expungement program for certain marijuana-related offenses, along with easier expungement processes for those not covered by the automatic expungements.
Senate Republicans, whose majority status was the primary roadblock to legalization efforts from Walz’s election on a pro-legalization platform in 2018 until the Democratic Farmer Labor Party secured a trifecta last year, have largely remained opposed to the bill. Senator Glenn Gruenhagen, R-Glencoe, told the Senate Friday that the measure promoted “chaos in our society” and that he believed it was part of an effort to restrict gun rights.
Senator Jim Abeler, R-Anoka, took a more measured approach, saying that he would not oppose a bill with a higher age threshold. Abeler made headlines last year when he voted for a bill to legalize certain edible THC products, then told the press he had not realized that the bill would make those products available for mass consumption.
“For my district, Mr. President, if I were to vote for this, it would be popular. But I didn’t come here, Mr. President, to be popular… I came here to be responsible,” he said, addressing Senate President Bobby Joe Champion, DFL-Minneapolis.
Paying reference to his own college-aged marijuana smoking and to the pothead classic film “Reefer Madness,” Abeler said that today’s marijuana is more dangerous than the weed he’d smoked.
“I didn’t know you can get schizophrenia. You can get that with this stuff. We didn’t have that back in my time. You can get psychosis,” Abeler said. “For a person who’s 30 years old, to go have marijuana, I would vote for that. But to allow a person who’s 21 to have that, their synapses, Mr. President, according to the evidence that’s unrebutted, those synapses… a 21-year-old isn’t quite ready to go.”
Republicans pitched a number of amendments to the bill throughout Friday’s session, all of which failed. Successful amendments brought by freshman Senator Grant Hauschild, DFL-Hermantown, granted extra money to law enforcement for drug recognition training and allowing cities to cap the number of marijuana businesses within their limits at a lower number than the original bill. Issues of local control were a major concern of House Republicans, and Hauschild’s amendments may become a point of contention at reconciliation.
If passed, the bill would make possession and home-grown marijuana legal by this summer. Legal commercial markets would take longer, Port has said – somewhere between a year and 16 months.
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