Medical marijuana passes NC Senate, heads to the House. Will this time be different?

Once more, North Carolina senators threw their support behind a bill legalizing medical marijuana in the state. House Bill 563 passed a final vote in the Senate with bipartisan support. Just 10 lawmakers voted against the bill.

Whether lawmakers in the House will have an about-face from past years and approve legalization remains to be seen. But in the midst of a stalemate on budget adjustments and considering House Republicans’ past aversion to the idea, chances seem low.

House Bill 563 allows the use of marijuana statewide for people who have cancer, ALS and other ailments. It also creates an 11-member board tasked with approving, suspending and revoking licenses for suppliers of marijuana. This board would supervise revenue generation and approve 10 licenses from a list of recommendations.

Kratom, xylazine and tianeptine would be added to the state’s list of controlled substances, banning those drugs.

The bill also adds more regulation to hemp. It would prohibit sales of hemp and hemp-derived products to people under 21. Sellers would need to have a license, and products would need to be tested before distribution. Packaging of these products would need to be child-resistant and properly labeled with ingredient details.

Marijuana and hemp are both born from the cannabis plant. But hemp, which is legal nationally and in the state, must have less than 0.3% of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which produces what’s commonly associated with the marijuana’s “high.”

Josh Stein’s position

Despite the bipartisan support, not all was praise.

Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein said the bill lacks protections and should go further in decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana and expunging past convictions.

“It’s past time for N.C. to move forward on medical cannabis, decriminalization of simple possession, and expungement of criminal records, but we have to do it right. HB 563 fails to adequately protect kids,” Stein wrote in a statement shared last week.

“The bill authorizes intoxicating cannabis (THC) for adults, but it does NOT protect kids by requiring an ID check, placing drugs behind the counter and away from kids (or keep kids out of stores altogether), keeping sales away from schools, adequately addressing advertising or packaging, protecting against child poisonings, or holding violators accountable. We can and must do more to keep our kids safe,” wrote Stein, who is running for governor.

After the Senate vote, Stein said in a statement that he thanked the Senate for improving the bill but “there is still real work to be done to better protect kids given the bill’s authorization of adult use intoxicating cannabis (THC) in North Carolina.” Senators amended the bill on Monday to require stricter ID checks for hemp sales. They also amended the bill to require stores open to customers under 21 to make hemp products only accessible with help from an employee.

Various Democratic lawmakers expressed concerns with a change to the bill on Monday that says that if marijuana “is rescheduled or deleted as a controlled substance under federal law, marijuana shall not be rescheduled or deleted under this Article unless the General Assembly enacts legislation.”

Sen. Mujtaba Mohammed of Charlotte said he believed that provision infringes on the part of the Constitution that says federal law generally takes precedence over state law.

GOP concerns

All those who voted against the bill in the Senate were Republicans.

Sen. Tom McInnis, a Republican from Moore County, said Monday he had “no doubt that this bill sponsor’s well intended. But as my mother used to say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

McInnis said that he buried a cousin who “smoked one marijuana joint at 14 years old and never put it down.”

The National Institute on Drug Abuse says there are no reports of teens or adults dying from marijuana alone but that marijuana use can lead to a substance use disorder. It also says marijuana can affect brain development, in particular for teens.

Republican Sen. Norman Sanderson of Pamlico County said medical marijuana legalization is a “slippery slope.”

“I’m sad and disappointed because it’s connected to a bill that I think would have done a lot of good,” he said, referring to the provisions regulating hemp and other drugs, drafted in the initial House version of the bill.

Sen. Ralph Hise, a Mitchell County Republican, spoke in defense of the bill, saying he had “no concern if a terminal cancer patient smokes anything.”

“I’ve seen what high doses of OxyContin will do ... and I don’t suspect that marijuana is worse.”

“All this bill does is allow the use of that for identified diagnosis from a medical provider and that in itself is not something I oppose. But don’t take this as a step away from fighting the impact of marijuana on our kids and on our communities,” he said.

Next steps

The bill now goes back to the House – which drafted the initial version of HB 563 without including legalization – for a concurrence vote. Legalization came back up on the table during a Senate judiciary committee meeting on Wednesday, when Republican senators amended the bill to add legalization by tacking on the NC Compassionate Care Act, a bill that has cropped up over the years but has failed to pass the House.

The Compassionate Care Act is sponsored by Republican Sens. Bill Rabon and Michael Lee and Democratic Sen. Paul Lowe. HB 563 was a solely GOP-sponsored bill.

The maneuver by the Senate came as a surprise to many, including one of the primary sponsors of HB 563, Republican Rep. Jeff McNeely, who spoke about the bill during a rules committee meeting before an initial vote by the Senate. Monday’s vote was the final Senate vote.

“I know many of you are just like me, in a little bit of state of shock that something was added to my bill, and we’ll work through that, but don’t take your eye off the ball,” McNeely said.

“The thing we’re trying to do here is regulate a completely unregulated industry … so don’t forget that part of this when some new shiny object is added or put in or whatever,” he said.

The bill’s chances in the House

Before the Senate’s vote, House Speaker Tim Moore said that he supports the Compassionate Care Act and that he has “distant family members and cousins who I believe probably use it, and I know there are folks who suffer from PTSD and other conditions” who say it helps them, he said.

But “when we caucused this bill last year and when we got a count, there were not 37 yes votes on the bill,” he said. The House has a rule that the majority of Republicans need to support a bill for it to move forward, Moore said.

Asked about the bill’s chance this year, Moore said “We haven’t caucused. So I don’t know.”

Rabon, speaking on his experience battling stage-three colon cancer and using marijuana illegally, said during a rules committee meeting Thursday: “I was close to death a long time ago, and I would have died had I not broken the law, and I had not taken the advice of my health care provider and gotten a cannabis product. I was ready to give up.”

“You can sit there and say ‘ohh.’ No. I lived it. If you haven’t lived it, don’t tell me what it is. I was in it. So that’s the way I feel about it and I’m going to push it and I’m gonna stay in this legislature until it passes.”

Rabon also said North Carolina needs to take action considering federal moves.

National outlets have reported that the federal government could be on the brink of recognizing marijuana’s medical uses and reclassifying it from a Schedule I drug, alongside heroin and LSD, to a Schedule III dug, alongside ketamine and some anabolic steroids.

In addition to the stalemate on marijuana, the GOP-controlled Senate and House have not come to an agreement on how to amend the two-year budget passed last year. Both chambers have passed separate versions of a budget.