The big crowd at Donald Trump’s presidential campaign rally in Columbus this week was dotted with people carrying clipboards with green marijuana leaves on the back, quietly collecting signatures for pot legalization.
Ohio will ring in the New Year with a crop of renewed pot proposals, including two potential constitutional amendments and state medical-marijuana legislation.
All of this is on tap during a heated presidential campaign year.
The group gathering signatures at the Trump rally was LegalizeOhio, the name used by Ohioans to End Prohibition, which proposes legalizing marijuana and hemp, a plant from the same family that’s used to produce oil, fiber and other products.
The pot campaign is not connected to Trump’s presidential bid but used the occasion to collect signatures from the crowd of more than 10,000.
Sri Kavuru, president of Ohioans to End Prohibition, said his group began collecting names for a 2016 ballot issue as soon as it was approved by the Ohio Ballot Board in June. Kavuru’s troops paused to oppose State Issue 3, the for-profit marijuana legalization campaign by ResponsibleOhio, which was voted down by Ohio voters by a nearly 2-1 margin in the Nov. 3 election.
Now Kavuru’s team is back at work. He said is confident the campaign will gather the 305,591 valid signatures of registered voters necessary to qualify for the November 2016 ballot.
LegalizeOhio’s proposal is significantly different from ResponsibleOhio’s original plan, which called for limiting commercial growers to 10 preselected investment groups and requiring a $50 license for home-growing marijuana.
However, a revised ResponsibleOhio plan that’s in the works scraps the monopoly in favor of a “ free-market approach,” requires no license for marijuana grown at home and allows farmers to grow hemp crops.
Kavuru said his group’s proposal “is exactly the law ResponsibleOhio is now writing. We’ve already done it. We’ve already put it together.”
Key elements of LegalizeOhio’s plan:
• Ohioans 21 or older could have 100 grams of marijuana, 500 grams of marijuana-infused solids, 2 liters of marijuana-infused liquids and 25 grams of marijuana concentrates.
• Adults could grow six flowering marijuana plants at home in a “secure area of their property away from public view” without a permit or inspections.
• Marijuana sales would be regulated by a new division of the Ohio Department of Commerce.
• A new medical-marijuana program would be regulated by the Ohio Department of Health.
• The hemp program would be overseen by the Ohio Department of Agriculture.
• Marijuana sales would be taxed, with revenue earmarked for county, municipal and township governments, Ohio’s public-pension systems, schools, drug education, drug treatment and research.
Kavuru said the fact that voters soundly rejected ResponsibleOhio doesn’t mean they oppose marijuana legalization. He said it was clear that they opposed the marijuana-monopoly plan.
“It was a bad law, a bad plan that was ridiculed nationally,” he said. “I don’t think it was the last word on legalization.”
Ian James, executive director of ResponsibleOhio, said in a recent open letter: “We quite publicly stumbled and fell. In picking ourselves up, we remained fully aware that Ohio continues a failed marijuana prohibition that a majority of Ohioans wish to end.”
Ohioans Against Marijuana Monopolies, which gathered a diverse coalition to oppose State Issue 3, remains opposed to marijuana legalization.
Meanwhile, as LegalizeOhio and ResponsibleOhio are drafting their game plans, leaders in the General Assembly are staking out the first-ever widely supported medical-marijuana proposal. Speaker Cliff Rosenberger, R-Clarksville, said the legislature will involve medical professionals and might pass medical-marijuana laws and a pilot project next year.
But the Ohio State Medical Association thinks the time isn’t yet right for medical-marijuana legislation because not enough clinical research has been done to justify state action.
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/11/27/new-plans-for-legal-pot-sprouting-like-weeds.html
Ohio will ring in the New Year with a crop of renewed pot proposals, including two potential constitutional amendments and state medical-marijuana legislation.
All of this is on tap during a heated presidential campaign year.
The group gathering signatures at the Trump rally was LegalizeOhio, the name used by Ohioans to End Prohibition, which proposes legalizing marijuana and hemp, a plant from the same family that’s used to produce oil, fiber and other products.
The pot campaign is not connected to Trump’s presidential bid but used the occasion to collect signatures from the crowd of more than 10,000.
Sri Kavuru, president of Ohioans to End Prohibition, said his group began collecting names for a 2016 ballot issue as soon as it was approved by the Ohio Ballot Board in June. Kavuru’s troops paused to oppose State Issue 3, the for-profit marijuana legalization campaign by ResponsibleOhio, which was voted down by Ohio voters by a nearly 2-1 margin in the Nov. 3 election.
Now Kavuru’s team is back at work. He said is confident the campaign will gather the 305,591 valid signatures of registered voters necessary to qualify for the November 2016 ballot.
LegalizeOhio’s proposal is significantly different from ResponsibleOhio’s original plan, which called for limiting commercial growers to 10 preselected investment groups and requiring a $50 license for home-growing marijuana.
However, a revised ResponsibleOhio plan that’s in the works scraps the monopoly in favor of a “ free-market approach,” requires no license for marijuana grown at home and allows farmers to grow hemp crops.
Kavuru said his group’s proposal “is exactly the law ResponsibleOhio is now writing. We’ve already done it. We’ve already put it together.”
Key elements of LegalizeOhio’s plan:
• Ohioans 21 or older could have 100 grams of marijuana, 500 grams of marijuana-infused solids, 2 liters of marijuana-infused liquids and 25 grams of marijuana concentrates.
• Adults could grow six flowering marijuana plants at home in a “secure area of their property away from public view” without a permit or inspections.
• Marijuana sales would be regulated by a new division of the Ohio Department of Commerce.
• A new medical-marijuana program would be regulated by the Ohio Department of Health.
• The hemp program would be overseen by the Ohio Department of Agriculture.
• Marijuana sales would be taxed, with revenue earmarked for county, municipal and township governments, Ohio’s public-pension systems, schools, drug education, drug treatment and research.
Kavuru said the fact that voters soundly rejected ResponsibleOhio doesn’t mean they oppose marijuana legalization. He said it was clear that they opposed the marijuana-monopoly plan.
“It was a bad law, a bad plan that was ridiculed nationally,” he said. “I don’t think it was the last word on legalization.”
Ian James, executive director of ResponsibleOhio, said in a recent open letter: “We quite publicly stumbled and fell. In picking ourselves up, we remained fully aware that Ohio continues a failed marijuana prohibition that a majority of Ohioans wish to end.”
Ohioans Against Marijuana Monopolies, which gathered a diverse coalition to oppose State Issue 3, remains opposed to marijuana legalization.
Meanwhile, as LegalizeOhio and ResponsibleOhio are drafting their game plans, leaders in the General Assembly are staking out the first-ever widely supported medical-marijuana proposal. Speaker Cliff Rosenberger, R-Clarksville, said the legislature will involve medical professionals and might pass medical-marijuana laws and a pilot project next year.
But the Ohio State Medical Association thinks the time isn’t yet right for medical-marijuana legislation because not enough clinical research has been done to justify state action.
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/11/27/new-plans-for-legal-pot-sprouting-like-weeds.html
