It looks like Connecticut is going to be the 18th US state to adopt a recreational cannabis legalization policy. After talks of vetos, and fighting over provisions, the bill is up for its final vote before being signed by the governor.
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Connecticut and recreational cannabis legalization
On Tuesday, June 15th, the Connecticut senate passed legislationfor the second time this week, for the recreational legalization of cannabis, and to establish an adult-use market. The original bill was passed on June 8th, during the regular congressional session, with a vote of 19-17, however it never made it to the House before adjournment by the General Assembly on June 9th. Before the second vote, revisions were made to the bill, which the governor decided were not appropriate. The revised version passed the Senate again Tuesday during a two-day special legislative session in a vote of 19-12, only to have the governor threaten a veto if it passed the House in the same form.
Recreational cannabis legalization efforts started about five years ago in Connecticut, but floundered over the years. This year, there was renewed vigor, and support by Governor Ned Lamont. The bill should have come up before the end of the legislative session, but as tends to happen in government, it stalled for months, before finally coming to light right before congressional sessions ended. Regardless, its there now, and it looks like Connecticut will be state # 18 following New York and New Mexico, which both legalized a couple months back.
What is the issue?
The issue making a mess of things has to do with a provision about equity, which was specifically designed to help those who had faced prosecution as a result of cannabis criminalization, to get something back. The idea being to allow this population the ability to more quickly obtain licensing to cultivate or produce cannabis products, and be a part of the legal market. Unfortunately, when the provision was added after the first Senate vote, lawmakers went a bit crazy, expanding that equity to other drug offenders, other criminal offenders, and even their families, which earned the ire of the governor, and rightly so.
Apparently not. This is what he stated: “If a rich suburban kid is selling pot outside of a high school and he gets busted all of the sudden he’s at the front of the line to get a license, that didn’t seem to make much sense to me. I really think it’s the community, not the person, that ought to be prioritized.” Weirdly, I think it’s the person who had to serve the sentence who should get the help, and it shouldn’t matter who they are. But that’s just my opinion.
Sen. Gary Winfield, who co-chairs the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee, and who is a major sponsor of the bill, did show an understanding of going a bit too far with including so many groups:
“I think what we were doing was trying to address the concerns of some people who felt like people who had records, particularly on cannabis, in the criminal justice system, would be able to participate under the system… I think that the initial change we made definitely allowed this to go too far, and so we made an attempt to bring it back along the lines of some of the concerns of the governor … In doing that, clearly the governor feels as though we missed the mark.”