Going slow on marijuana
Rauner reins in pot bills
GOVERNMENT | Bruce Rushton
While other states ease up on marijuana laws, Gov. Bruce Rauner last week took a cautious route in altering bills sent to him by legislators who aimed to make life easier both for medical marijuana patients and recreational users.
Rauner rejected a bill that would have extended the state’s pilot medical marijuana program, now scheduled to sunset on Jan. 1, 2018, for four years from the date that the first legal sales take place, which is expected sometime later this year. Backers said that a four-year extension was crucial for pot entrepreneurs who are paying millions of dollars in licensing fees and construction costs. The governor amended the bill to extend the program for just four months.
“Given that no sale has yet occurred and we have not had an opportunity to evaluate the success and failure of the pilot program, a further extension would be premature,” the governor said in his veto message.
It was, perhaps, not surprising, given that Rauner blasted the program during last year’s gubernatorial campaign, saying that the state should have auctioned off licenses to grow and sell marijuana instead of awarding licenses to applicants in a secretive process that prohibited making license applications public.
Rauner also amended a bill that decriminalizes marijuana possession but kept intact the key provision: People caught with small amounts of marijuana would be fined, not sent to jail, and the record of their brush with the law would automatically disappear after six months. Lawmakers set the threshold at 15 grams, or slightly more than a half-ounce, so that anyone possessing more than that could still be found guilty of a misdemeanor (or even a felony if they have a sufficient criminal record) as opposed to a petty offense. The governor, however, reduced the threshold to 10 grams. He also raised the maximum fine from $100 to $200.
The governor also dialed back a provision to allow driving with as much as 15 nanograms of THC, pot’s active ingredient, in the bloodstream. Illinois now has a zerotolerance law, which means that drivers can be found guilty of driving under the influence even if they haven’t consumed marijuana, which lingers in the system long after the high is gone, for more than a day. Rauner reduced the threshold from 15 nanograms to 5.
If lawmakers don’t agree to changes the bills will die; the legislature could also override the governor and pass the original bills into law.
Rep. Kelly Cassidy, D-Chicago, who sponsored the decriminalization bill, blasted Rauner.
“Real progress was a pen stroke away, but I stand here today shocked,” Cassidy wrote in an article published by Reboot Illinois. “The governor’s changes in this area will not make our communities safer, but will instead just put more people into our jails and prisons who don’t need to be there.”
But Dan Linn, executive director of the state chapter of the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws called the governor’s actions “a good compromise between what we thought would happen.”
The state should make the medical marijuana program permanent, Linn said, but there is time for lawmakers to revisit the issue before the program is scheduled to end in 2018. And Rauner’s changes to the decriminalization bill would still be an improvement over current laws, Linn said.
“There’s a reasonableness to it,” Linn said. “We’re willing to take baby steps. If some of our baby steps are smaller than we’d like them to be, we’re still happy to move forward.”
It is neither easy nor simple nor cheap to get a medical marijuana card – applicants must pay a $100 fee to the state, plus a $50 fee to be fingerprinted, plus pay for a visit to a physician to get a recommendation for marijuana use. The list of ailments for which marijuana can be used is small compared with other states. But Linn said that he doesn’t believe that decriminalizing possession for personal use would undercut the state’s medical marijuana program by steering would-be customers to the black market.
“People don’t want to deal with criminals,” Linn said. “The medicine that they’ll be getting will be tested, it will have quality controls. Some people want (skin) patches or edibles that they can’t get in the illegal marketplace.”
Chris Stone, a lobbyist who is working as a consultant to HealthCentral, which plans to open two medical marijuana dispensaries on Adams Street, said that he doesn’t have a problem with decriminalization. Ten grams is a fair amount of marijuana – in Washington state, where recreational use is legal, the going rate is $20 a gram – but not so much that people would divide up 10-gram bags for sale to compete with legal dispensaries, Stone said.
By contrast, the governor’s failure to extend the pilot program for four years could be a blow to a fledgling industry where cannabis entrepreneurs have invested tens of millions of dollars, Stone said. If investors have just two years to make good on their money, the price of marijuana will be about 25 percent higher, he predicted.
“For the patient, that’s not good,” Stone said.
