NC’s medical marijuana bill didn’t advance in 2021. Here’s what to expect this year.
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NC’s state of mind on medical marijuana
A poll earlier this month of North Carolina voters found 68% support legalizing medical marijuana while 19% don’t. Yet, bipartisan momentum for 2021’s medical marijuana bill fizzled in the state legislature. Will lawmakers revisit the topic in 2022? While the state awaits a decision, did you know medical marijuana soon will be available in one small pocket of North Carolina? And legal or otherwise, do you know the benefits and risks of THC, THC delta-8 and CBD?
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For a few months in 2021 a bill to legalize medical marijuana had never-before-seen levels of momentum at the North Carolina General Assembly.
No weed legalization bill had ever passed even a single committee before. This one sailed through multiple committees. It was just one step from a vote in the N.C. Senate, after receiving support from two of the most powerful Republican senators as well as the head of the Legislative Black Caucus.
Then it all abruptly stopped, with no explanation.
Advocates were left dazed and confused, as the bill stagnated for months on end. Opponents celebrated — but only cautiously. One thing both sides seem to agree on is that the bill isn’t dead.
Everyone expects the medical marijuana bill to come back up this spring, when the legislature returns to Raleigh about a month from now for the 2022 “short session,” which will likely last several months.
The most vocal supporters of the bill have been veterans, many of whom came to the legislature to publicly speak about their darkest moments in their struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder and thoughts of suicide. The list of medical conditions the bill would cover is fairly limited — no glaucoma, chronic pain or anxiety, unlike in other states — but PTSD is on the list.
“I am a supporter,” said Sen. Michael Lazzara, a Republican from Jacksonville, in a recent interview. “I’m in a military community. I’ve seen the many wars during my time that our service members have been deployed to and come back with injuries and PTSD, and a lot of these folks are being put on severe medications that lead to substance abuse and self-medication and there is a dire need for an alternative.”
It’s not only a military-focused bill, though. Cancer, sickle cell anemia, Crohn’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and anything with a terminal diagnosis could have marijuana prescribed if the bill passes, in addition to other ailments.
Nearly 70% of North Carolinians support legalizing medical marijuana, according to an Emerson poll conducted earlier this month. The poll of more than 1,000 primary voters found 68% support making marijuana legal for medical purposes while 19% did not. Legalizing recreational marijuana — which is not being considered by the legislature — was split, with 46% in favor and 43% opposed.
Even opponents of the bill say they expect to be fighting it again this spring, and that the bill was just delayed last year, not fully defeated.
“I do anticipate, however, that the bill will be back on the table in the spring, although I have no absolute confirmation of it,” said the Rev. Mark Creech, one of the state’s most vocal marijuana opponents and executive director of the Christian Action League.
Garrett Perdue, CEO of a Morrisville-based hemp company and the son of former Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue, also expects it to come back up this spring — and hopes it passes. He credited the emotional testimony lawmakers heard last year from veterans, who said pharmaceuticals didn’t help their suicidal thoughts but marijuana did.
“I don’t know how you can call yourself the most veteran-friendly state and don’t allow veterans to have access to these products,” Perdue said.
So all eyes are now on the new legislative session that will start about a month from now, in late May.
What could happen in any 2022 bill?
The bill underwent numerous additions, subtractions and edits last year, and more are almost certainly in store if it continues moving forward. There are many different parts, from its effects on law enforcement to how it will be taxed, who can grow it, who can sell it, how it can or can’t be marketed, how prescribing doctors should be regulated and more.
“There’s a lot to learn,” said Pat Oglesby, a Chapel Hill tax attorney and former U.S. Senate staffer who has worked on medical marijuana issues in other states. “Listen. Nobody knows how to do this. It’s really hard to bring a drug from illegality to legality and get it exactly right.”
Republican Sen. Bill Rabon, a Southport veterinarian who leads the powerful Senate Rules Committee and is the bill’s main sponsor, declined to be interviewed by The News & Observer for this story. But he did say in a written statement that ever since the bill stopped moving last year he has kept working on tweaks, with input from his fellow Republicans and other interested parties.
He said he wants to avoid the experience other states have had, of passing a bill too quickly and then having to come back and make change after change.
“Other states that have passed medical marijuana bills have had to adjust over time because their laws had unintended consequences,” Rabon said. “My goal is to get this bill right the first time.”
Rabon and the bill’s other main backers on the GOP side have said repeatedly that while they feel medical marijuana is appropriate, they want to pass a relatively limited bill with what will be the nation’s strictest rules. Democrats tried getting some broader categories added — like prescribing marijuana for chronic pain, or to help people beat opioid addictions — but were shot down.
Who would run dispensaries?
One debate last year, for example, was how many companies should be allowed to operate dispensaries, how many dispensaries each company could have and how to ensure they’d be spread across the state and not just all in Charlotte and the Triangle.
Oglesby said he thinks lawmakers are making it too complicated. Instead of having private companies compete for licenses, he said, just have the state run the dispensaries like it already does with liquor and ABC stores. Not only would that mean more revenue for the government, it could also help North Carolina avoid the sorts of lawsuits from rejected companies that have delayed marijuana sales in other states.
“That puts the whole thing on hold because you have to wait while the lawsuits play out,” he said.
If lawmakers don’t take his advice and stick with the private licensing system, then another potentially controversial part of the bill is one that says nobody with a conviction for selling drugs, including marijuana, should be allowed to get a dispensary license.
Someone who hopes to change lawmakers’ thinking on that is Marvin “Kyng Huncho” Flowers, who recently finished a three-year stint in federal prison for distributing marijuana out of a Durham apartment.
With dreadlocks and tattoos from his fingers to his forehead, the 28-year-old Flowers acknowledges he’s not the type of person politicians and businessmen usually listen to. But that’s exactly why they should be listening now, he said, since they probably don’t understand the market like he does.
“If they was to actually pull some guys like me — and I know 10, 20 other guys like myself — into their board rooms and talk to them about how the marketing and the pricing could be right, to really make a big profit, it’d be much easier,” Flowers said. “And it’ll cut down the crime on the street level. Because now you have no dealers getting robbed, or people shooting, killings, stuff like that. Because everything is now corporate. But you have to work with us.”
Flowers also brought up the social and racial justice arguments for reforming marijuana laws, saying he met people — people of color, specifically — when he was in prison who were doing 20 years for $10 worth of pot. And in the legislature, some Democrats tried to use last year’s momentum on medical marijuana to also push for the decriminalization of small amounts of weed like that.
Republicans have resisted that idea so far, but Democrats could make another push for it this year, especially as a task force led by Attorney General Josh Stein and N.C. Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls recently recommended that the legislature approve decriminalization.
PTSD, cancer diagnoses lead to military support
Many veterans believe they could benefit from using marijuana instead of pills and other drugs, to help treat issues related to their service like PTSD or cancers caused by burn pit exposure — or even the toxic drinking water at Camp Lejeune, in Lazzara’s district, that likely led to thousands of cases of cancer and Parkinson’s disease for people who lived on the base through the 1980s.
During last year’s hearings, numerous veterans came forward to speak about their struggles with suicidal thoughts, before revealing that they only improved once they started illegally using marijuana.
“On that day my life changed for the better,” said Gary Hess, who told lawmakers about the gruesome memories he has from Middle Eastern combat deployments with the Marines. “It empowered me. It gave me hope. It gave my wife hope.”
What stopped the marijuana bill last year?
Democrats in North Carolina never legalized medical marijuana while they controlled the legislature up through 2010, by which time 15 other states had done so. They have warmed up to the idea since then, but Republicans mostly ignored legalization bills Democrats filed.
But that all changed a year ago. That’s when Rabon, the bill’s main sponsor, joined with Wilmington Republican Sen. Michael Lee and Winston-Salem Democratic Sen. Paul Lowe, the head of the Legislative Black Caucus, to file Senate Bill 711. It rocketed through the legislative process, undergoing numerous revisions as it passed the Senate’s committees on health care, finance and the judiciary.
“This bill has been one of the most vetted pieces of legislation this biennium,” Rabon said in his written statement. “And I look forward to working with my colleagues to get it over the finish line.”
Finally, last summer, the bill arrived at the last and easiest step before a floor vote: Rabon’s own Rules Committee, where it was virtually guaranteed to pass and head to the floor for a vote by the full Senate.
Instead, that hearing never happened.
It’s possible bigger priorities simply got in the way. This was in August, when the state budget was already delayed two months beyond its due date (it didn’t pass until November). At the same time, lawmakers were also ramping up the time-consuming redistricting process.
Beyond those distractions, it’s also possible internal GOP politics held the bill up.
The bill would almost certainly pass if put up for a vote. But there is sometimes a philosophy in legislative politics that a bill should never be allowed to go up for a vote unless at least half of the majority party supports it. And that math was — and remains — much hazier.
That same philosophy may have tanked causes like a constitutional amendment for redistricting reform, which in 2019 had an influential GOP sponsor plus more than half of the House of Representatives as co-sponsors, but was never allowed a committee hearing, let alone a vote. But at the same time, it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. When the Senate passed a sports betting bill recently, it passed with most Republicans voting no.
Who opposes the bill? Who’s in favor of it?
Some key GOP senators are strong supporters, but others are skeptical or outright opposed.
Senate leader Phil Berger said earlier this year on the Business NC podcast that he would vote for the measure and would work to bring Rabon’s bill forward.
Two of his top deputies — Majority Leader Kathy Harrington and Deputy President Pro Tem Ralph Hise — are on opposite sides, with Harrington a supporter and Hise an opponent. A good number of GOP senators have not made their opinion public at all — a strategy the House has also adopted en masse, with Republicans largely not commenting on the bill while it remains tied up in the Senate.
House Speaker Tim Moore has expressed doubt that the bill would reach his chamber, in part because of the ever-changing nature of the legislation and its numerous complexities.
The philosophy of not bringing a bill up for a vote if it doesn’t have a majority of the party in charge is giving hope to opponents like Creech, the Christian Action League executive director. He doesn’t believe Rabon, Harrington and the other backers have been able to sway enough of their GOP colleagues.
“If in the spring, the legislation does move again, passing out of the Senate Rules Committee and to the floor, I think it would pass largely with Democrat support,” Creech said. “I think there would be only a minority of Republicans who would vote for it.”
But supporters like Perdue say they’re not so sure. He pointed to an emotional speech Harrington, the majority leader, gave at one early hearing. It surprised many, since she’s known for working behind the scenes and rarely speaking publicly.
Harrington disclosed that her husband had recently been diagnosed with a type of blood cancer. Because of that she researched medical marijuana, she said, and what she learned changed her mind. She is a co-sponsor of the bill.
“If you had asked me six months ago if I would support this bill, I would have said no,” The N&O reported she said at the time. “But life comes at you fast.”
Perdue said that speech, and who it came from, could easily have swung multiple votes.
“I would suspect that that moment was catalytic within the Senate,” he said.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it at https://campsite.bio/underthedome or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published April 20, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "NC’s medical marijuana bill didn’t advance in 2021. Here’s what to expect this year.."
