The bill’s earnings may not even cover the costs of its provisions for regulation, enforcement, and economic development. Don’t expect recreational marijuana to raise money to improve those programs, warned the chair of the Minnesota House committee in charge of taxes, in a letter to supporters of education and social services on Thursday.
The big recreational Marijuana bill’s introduction served as an opportunity for Rep. Aisha Gomez, a Minneapolis DFLer and chair of the House Taxes Committee, to claim that it won’t generate a lot of money for other programs. Cannabis taxes in our law won’t help anyone with their societal issues, she claimed.
“We’re not going to utilize taxes to create all the affordable housing we need, fix all the infrastructure we need, or make the necessary reforms to education in our communities. “We intended this bill to remedy the wrongs of prohibition, to move people from an unregulated market into a regulated market, which means we try not to put a high tax on cannabis so it can compete,” the author of the bill said.
It was referred to as a “scolding, tax-related, final note” by the sender. But concurrently, supporters from the House and Senate, all DFLers, projected passage this year. I predict that Minnesota will legalize cannabis for adult use in 2023.
Rep. Zack Stephenson, DFL Coon Rapids, stated on Thursday that the process “begins today.” The first hearing on House File 100 will take place on January 11. According to Stephenson, the current laws are more detrimental than beneficial.
“Millions of dollars are being spent by state and municipal governments to enforce rules that don’t benefit anyone,” The bill that passed the House did not receive a hearing in the GOP-controlled Senate, according to Sen. Lindsey Port, a senator from Burnsville who will serve as the primary sponsor in the Senate.
She predicted that would change this session, but it also indicated that the Senate would need to learn more about the problems than the House. We’ll take our time educating our members to ensure that we can maintain the same level of bipartisan support that was achieved in the House, she said.
“The Senate is dedicated to seeing that this wrong is righted,” Gov. Tim Walz supports legalizing and claims that the impacted state agencies have started their preparations. Along with Washington, D.C., and Guam, 19 additional states have legalized marijuana for recreational use through legislation or ballot initiatives after Washington and Colorado did so by initiative in 2012.
The bill allows roughly $100 million over the course of the first two years to various agencies involved in the new project, with amounts ranging from $15 million for the Office of Cannabis Management, a state agency, to $1.7 million for the Cannabis Expungement Board, to $17 million for initiatives to support low-income and underrepresented groups who want to enter the industry through CanStartup, can navigate, and CanTrain.
It also includes $1 million for the courts, $5 million for the State Patrol, $5.5 million for the Department of Public Safety, and $8 million for drug rehab. According to Gomez, the tax rate of 8% on retail gross revenues will generate nearly $100 million in revenue during the same time period. Regular sales taxes will still be charged, but local governments cannot impose local sales taxes.
The law is identical to the one that was approved by the House in 2021, but it has been modified. For example, the language regarding edibles made from hemp that was part of a big omnibus package last spring has been fixed. By legalizing intoxicating beverages, edibles, and vapes, this bill spawned a brand-new, largely unregulated, untaxed business.
Under a new oversight board, the new bill integrates that system with the legalization of recreational marijuana. Supporters of legal marijuana are concerned that if governments try to tax Marijuana products too heavily, they won’t be able to compete with the long-established criminal market.
The bill’s earnings may not even cover the costs of its provisions for regulation, enforcement, and economic development. Among these are lending and training programs to assist people of color and others with lower incomes, who have historically been the targets of marijuana prohibition legislation, to join the new industry.
At a symposium on legalization in Minneapolis in 2019, a market analyst for legal marijuana calculated that after five years, recreational marijuana will generate $300 million in taxes. That information was based on surveys of existing marijuana use and issues raised by Colorado, a state with a comparable population.
Even so, it was still a fraction of Minnesota’s tobacco tax revenue. Ryan Winkler, the then-House Majority Leader, stated at the same conference that legalization wasn’t done to raise money. The substance of the bill that was introduced on Thursday is attributable to Winkler. Then, Winkler declared, “We are not interested in this as a significant source of revenue for the state of Minnesota to deal with education or road development, things like that.
Gomez reaffirmed this viewpoint on Thursday. With the tax rate proposed in the bill, revenue would range from $100 million to $150 million over the course of two years. However, the House DFL is committed to using general fund earnings to make up the difference if that sum is insufficient to pay the initiatives in the measure.
According to Gomez, “our commitment to the people of Minnesota is that we’ll do everything in our power to ensure that everyone is safe, that our law enforcement has the resources they need to address this, that regulators have the resources they need to address this, and that we are staying true to the values that we embraced at the outset of our process.”
Among them is making certain that those impacted by prohibition have “pathways into this marketplace.”Regardless of where that potentially unstable cash stream goes, she said, “Our commitment to the health, safety, and equity that is encompassed here remains.”
The measure includes a large portion in response to requests that those with Marijuana-related convictions from before the drug was legalized have their records expunged. For less serious offenses, automatic expungement is provided by the bill, and requests for more serious offenses are reviewed by a new board.
Sen. Clare Oumou Verbeten, DFL-St. Paul, said, “We heard loud and clear from Minnesotans that we cannot legalize cannabis without expungement.” “This is a matter of racial justice.” This week, opponents of legalizing argued that it was “less than a slam dunk” to succeed and that lawmakers haven’t addressed issues like access for youths, workplace safety, or traffic safety.
Despite being called the “adult-use-cannabis” measure, it forbids use by anybody under the age of 20. According to John Hausladen, president, and CEO of the Minnesota Trucking Association, “We’re going to release more impaired drivers on Minnesota roadways on an already underfunded law enforcement contingent.”
According to Kim Bemis, the chair of Smart Approaches to Marijuana Minnesota, legal marijuana legislation in other states has not generated the money expected and has actually caused more issues than supporters have admitted. He stated that he was particularly worried about the effects of high potency levels on users, especially young people, of commercial products.
The notion that cartels and the black market will disappear is one of the biggest misconceptions concerning the commercialization of cannabis, according to Bemis. According to him, none of the other legalization states have experienced that. When the law allowing edibles made from hemp was passed, opponents claimed they and many others were caught off guard.
They had anticipated spending 2023 attempting to overturn that law, but they will now be engaged in a more significant conflict against legal marijuana. According to Hausladen, “the Legislature’s first obligation is to pass laws that are safe and the benefits outweigh the expenses,” which didn’t happen with the hemp measure from the previous year.
