Colorado and Washington implemented the legalization of recreational marijuana usage earlier this month, and after early sales were reported, many began wondering when other states, such as Ohio, would potentially follow.
Ohio Sen. Lou Gentile, D-Steubenville, said he doesn’t know if a similar initiative would be on the ballot in Ohio this fall, but said he is aware of at least one group trying to put one together.
“I’ve started to receive communications from local officials and citizens about the issue on both sides,” Gentile said. “I still am trying to get educated about the issue. I am open to conversations about medical purposes. I have a lot of questions and concerns about legalizing it for recreational use at this point.”
Colorado has projected nearly $600 million in sales annually, with $70 million in tax revenue. For the first week of sales, the Huffington Post reported dispensaries in Colorado made roughly $5 million in retail sales.
In Ohio, legislation on legalizing use of marijuana for medical or recreational uses has apparently stalled.
House Bill 153, introduced in May by three Democrats, aims to legalize some forms of medical marijuana usage but still sits in committee, according to statehouse legislative records. A joint resolution, which was also introduced in the House in May but has not yet been enacted, would have put legalizing “retail marijuana” on the November 2013 ballot.
Gentile said it would be highly unlikely for legislators to act, but there could still be hope for a ballot innovative brought up by citizens. It takes 1,000 signatures to be filed with the Ohio Attorney General’s office to start the bureaucratic process of a lot of paperwork filing and red-tape cutting.
“I’ve heard many of the arguments you might hear on the street,” Gentile said. “Certainly they’ve made their way to me and my office on both sides of the debate.”
Mayor Paul Wiehl said the trend seems to point to legalization being voted in at some point, and that Athens would be an area of Ohio in support of such legislation.
But Wiehl said he’d worry about controlling addiction and underage usage.
“How do you offset that and deal with it? How do you build in safeguards?” he said. “It creates a whole bureaucracy that has to be dealt with and can be funded, obviously, based on the numbers from Colorado and Washington. … It would be different territory.”
Athens Police Chief Tom Pyle said he hasn’t had any discussions with other law enforcement officials on the issue of marijuana legalization, but added the American system of government lends itself to the majority rule.
“I think that we have a system of government in place where if the populous wants it, they can certainly get it by power of the vote, and that’s the way it should be,” Pyle said.
He added if the majority of residents in Ohio want to legalize the drug, it would eventually happen.
“When it does, we will allow the law to guide what we do,” Pyle said.
Wiehl said the potential use of hemp for resources such as paper and cloth could be an added benefit of legalization.
“To me, (it) is a more of an important resource,” Wiehl said. “When you talk about paper, you have to cut down a forest to make a piece of paper and it takes 20 years to grow a tree whereas you can grow a hemp crop in a summer.
“That to me shows we aren’t being smart about our resources at some level.”
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