COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio House and Senate Republicans had finally agreed on a bill changing the state’s recreational marijuana policy, but hours before the vote was supposed to take place, it was pulled from the schedule.
Voters spoke loud and clear in November of 2023, with 57% of Ohioans voting yes on Issue 2: legalizing recreational marijuana.
“I voted for it,” state Rep. Jamie Callender (R-Concord), the House’s resident cannabis expert.
Callender has been smoking marijuana for decades and has been trying to reduce stigma around the product for just as long.
If you are 21 years old, you can smoke, vape, and ingest marijuana. Individually, you can grow six plants, but you can grow up to 12 plants per household if you live with others.
But since then, other Republican leaders have been trying to change the law.
For the past several months, the House and Senate chambers have been trying to compromise on their separate bills.
I have been covering marijuana policy extensively for years, including a series answering viewer questions about cannabis.
Ohio GOP plans to pass marijuana restrictions by end of June
In short, the Senate’s proposal decreases THC content, reduces home growing from 12 plants to 6, imposes more criminal penalties and takes away tax money from local municipalities that have dispensaries. The House’s latest version had none of those.
Click here for Senate version and here for House version changes.
“The Senate had proposed taking that tax away, and the House has fought really hard to keep that in…” Callender said. “We finally had that negotiated so it would stay in.”
Recently, Callender told me an agreement was reached on following most of the House’s new version, which mainly focused on preventing children from accessing the drug. The bill was set to hit the House floor Wednesday.
But in a turn of events, Republican infighting is preventing the bill from being passed.
“Apparently, the Senate changed their mind,” Callender said.
In a shock to House Speaker Matt Huffman (R-Lima), the Senate pulled out of the compromise.
“I’m pretty disappointed — we’re not going to have it on the floor today,” Huffman said. “To my surprise, there was a whole new set of issues, additional issues, which were raised Monday night by the Senate regarding what we were trying to do.”
It was a Senate push for 16 changes, ones that Huffman didn’t get to even see until the day before the vote was set to take place.
“They wanted to make a mandatory jail sentence for passing a joint between friends,” Callender said, referencing a provision on “sharing.”
The main holdup is the tax money, he added.
The law gives the 10% tax revenue from each marijuana sale to four different venues: 36% to the social equity fund, to help people disproportionately impacted by marijuana-related laws; 36% to host cities — ones that have dispensaries; 25% to the state’s mental health and addiction services department; and 3% to the state’s cannabis control department.
Instead, the Senate wants all the revenue from the tax to be sent to the state’s General Revenue Fund, meaning lawmakers can choose to allocate that money toward whatever they want.
The House, as Callender had mentioned, has a major sticking point with making sure that at least the local municipalities get at least some percentage of the tax revenue.
“What changed in the past 72 hours to pull the Senate out of the marijuana deal?” I asked Senate President Rob McColley (R-Napoleon)
“Well, I wouldn’t say anything has changed; I think the conversations have gone pretty well on it,” McColley responded. “I think, maybe, there was a misunderstanding as to where we might have been on the bill as both chambers.”
The president wants to follow his version of the legislation.
“Our priorities are in the bill that we already passed,” he said.
The teams will work together to actually come to an agreement as soon as possible, he continued.
“I would like to get something done by the end of June; I think [Huffman] would like to get something done by the end of June,” McColley added. “We’ll see if we can get something done in the next week.”
Huffman said he’s “not very optimistic” about that.
“I just told my caucus: ‘We’re not going to just say, “OK,” because we’re so anxious to pass the marijuana bill,’ which I’d like to get it done, but we’re not going to give up house priorities to do that,” the speaker said.
Several hours later, Huffman responded to additional cannabis questions.
“I thought we were on a path, this time last week, to pass it [this week],” the speaker said. “That was the kind of clear indication we had.”
However, when I pointed out to Huffman how McColley denied their agreement, he switched gears.
“There was no agreement to pull out of,” he said.
I asked why he would put a bill on the floor if there wasn’t an agreement.
“We were hoping that there would be, anticipating there would be, sounded like we might have, but it’s not correct to say that there was an agreement that anybody pulled out of,” he said.
However, his cousin and the resident marijuana expert in the opposite chamber, state Sen. Steve Huffman (R-Tipp City), said there was. The senator had been the main negotiating party for that chamber.
“We were in an agreement,” S. Huffman said.
He continued that policy staff and McColley brought “ongoing concerns” to him, but he believes they could be easily fixed. An additional reason why it was pulled is due to drafting issues with the bill language, he added.
“I believe that things are still being worked out, and I have the utmost confidence that we will resolve this by next Wednesday,” the senator said.
Callender isn’t so sure about that.
“Do you believe that the Senate will be going against the will of the voters with all of their requests?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said.
Callender said that this reminds him of the last General Assembly, when M. Huffman and former Speaker Jason Stephens (R-Kitts Hill) were squabbling constantly about everything, but especially marijuana.
Stephens and Callender prevented then-Senate President Huffman’s legislation from passing. Back in 2023-24, Huffman proposed a bill very similar to the Senate’s current version.
It appears that Huffman, with the House GOP, has shifted away from a more restrictive view to a position similar to the one Stephens held in the past.
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“If you can go to someplace that’s so fundamentally different from what we experience here on a day-to-day basis, you should absolutely take the opportunity to,” he said. “And Taiwan is that opportunity.”
