After a debate that lasted well into Thursday evening, the House Government Operations Committee voted 10-1 for legislation that would create a regulated retail market for marijuana in Vermont.
The bill would also establish a saliva-testing protocol to help police investigate impaired driving. The committee also changed the way the proposed legislation would empower local governments to restrict weed business. New language would require a community vote before any retail pot shops could open in a given municipality.
The legislation passed the Senate with no measures for roadside testing or other highway safety policies. Gov. Phil Scott has repeatedly said that he wouldn’t approve any retail cannabis bill that doesn’t include saliva testing for drivers and dedicated funding for education and prevention programs.
The new House version comes close to meeting Scott’s demands. It would create a substance misuse prevention fund with 30 percent of the tax revenues from pot sales, and it would establish a saliva-testing protocol to help police investigate driving under the influence.
While Scott favors roadside testing, the committee opted to require that saliva be collected at a police station or barracks and sent to a lab for analysis. Experts told the House Judiciary Committee that lab testing is far more accurate than roadside tests for the presence of THC, the psychoactive compound in marijuana. Police would need a warrant to collect a sample from an unwilling person.
At a press conference Thursday, the governor signaled a willingness to consider the legislation, but refused to comment on the specifics of the House proposal and didn’t say whether it meets his conditions.
“I’m always willing to listen, which I’ve been doing, and I haven’t heard enough,” Scott said.
The committee spent Thursday afternoon making its final changes to the bill. Rep. Jim Harrison (R-Chittenden) suggested a change that would require local communities to affirmatively vote to opt in to host cannabis businesses — pot shops, grow operations and the like would otherwise not be allowed.
The Senate version of the bill would allow weed businesses by default, and it would require local communities to hold a vote before banning them.
Committee vice chair John Gannon (D-Wilmington) said the opt-in proposal would be counter to a central goal: bringing illicit marijuana growers out of the shadows and into a legitimate, taxed industry.
Ultimately, the committee went with a compromise proposed by chair Sarah Copeland Hanzas (D-Bradford).
The new language would create an opt-in standard for retail cannabis stores, which would be barred unless local voters grant permission. Other cannabis-related businesses like growers, testing laboratories and processors would be allowed to operate regardless of local sentiment.
The other road safety provision has nothing to do with cannabis. In an effort to get the Senate to adopt an unrelated seatbelt policy, the committee added a provision that would allow police officers to stop drivers solely due to a seatbelt violation. Current law allows officers to ticket drivers for not wearing seatbelts, but only when police stop vehicles for another reason.
Before the full House votes on the bill, the Appropriations Committee is expected to review the tax structure proposed in the legislation. In its current form, the bill would levy a 16 percent excise tax on marijuana and allow municipal governments to charge an additional 2 percent local option tax.
John Walters contributed reporting.
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There’s no better way to turn hippies into Republicans than by taxing weed. Give it a couple of years and we’ll be hearing how cutting the tax will increase collected revenue.
As with alcohol, would any roadside test attempt to determine the % of THC in the body, below which you are not considered a risk? How does this work? Established users function with no impairment with higher amounts than novices. Would performance testing, eg. walking a line, be an acceptable test: fast, inexpensive, and accurate?
If you look at the patient statistics at the Emergency Rooms in Colorado, there is a significant increase in patients showing up with psychotic or mental health issues related to the use of pot. Will the tax money be used to pay for the increase here or will it be the usual “Let’s raise the taxes on the employed with good jobs” approach like they currently do?
Cannabis can stay in the salive for days if not weeks. I smell bs and a set up for sure. Definitely not happy with this.
The danger of this inaccurate saliva test is that people who were involved in a minor accident and NOT impaired could be prosecuted as if they were. Scott is being intellectually dishonest here: the saliva test will not only end up perpetrating many injustices — his claim that we will need this test AFTER the repeal of prohibition is based on a false insinuation that prohibition is being obeyed right now. In reality, prohibition is roundly DISOBEYED, yet we are not seeing a problem because cannabis does not impair drivers like alcohol does.
Scott is relying on scare tactics here: he pretends that we cannot punish careless driving without a drug test, and falsely insinuates that cannabis makes bad drivers, when it generally makes them more careful and polite. (Cannabis actually reduces road rage incidents, for example.) It does not increase traffic accidents in the aggregate because a slight reduction in reaction time is typically offset by a decrease in speeding and a greater amount of attentiveness to the task. If you want to be honest and realistic, you can just continue to issue citations for careless driving the same way you did before legalization.
We are not trying to promote cannabis use but we cannot ignore the fact that people are going to use it with or without prohibition, and it has not produced the kind of chaos which the far right is trying to scare us with. Scott does not really care about public safety, he is looking for plausible excuses to reject the bill because he fears that he will lose the support of the many religious bigots in his party if he concedes another front in the culture war. Scott is “willing to listen” alright… but he is never willing to be REASONABLE.
As we have seen in other states, the primary seat belt law is just a revenue raising measure (and another pretext that dirty cops will use to make unconstitutional traffic stops without a legitimate public safety foundation.)
Defective THC tests are already producing false arrests in other states. In the following example, malicious cops used a THC test as the basis for making a false arrest when they knew the product was not psychoactive. (These dirty cops charged an old lady with felony hashish possession for a bottle of CBD oil.) The point here is that we should not create dysfunctional tools of law enforcement which can easily be abused by corrupt public servants, and we cannot afford to cover the lawsuits that will certainly follow.
https://hightimes.com/news/69-year-old-woman-jailed-12-hours-after-disney-world-security-finds-her-cbd-oil/