The state brings in more tax money from the sale of cannabis than it does from alcohol. That's one reason why the government regulation of marijuana products and the people who use them are a continuously hot topic on Beacon Hill. GBH News State House reporter Mike Deehan compiled a rundown of the legislation that Massachusetts lawmakers are considering this session that could change how the government interacts with marijuana in the Commonwealth, and he spoke about it with GBH News' Judie Yuill. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Judie Yuill: Are state lawmakers considering altering the state's pot laws? What's on their agenda as they wrap up their two-year session?
Mike Deehan: Yeah. There's a lot of bills that are kind of up in the air right now. There's one main one, kind of a large bill, that collects a lot of the modifications and changes that are recommended by the Cannabis Control Commission. That's the board that regulates pot in Massachusetts. So, you know, nearly four years after legal sales started, there are a number of tweaks that this board wants to make, mostly about how cities and towns deal with the contracts that producers and sellers make with the municipalities that they set up shop in.
There have been multiple instances of municipalities either squeezing or abusing these so-called “host agreements,” or in some cases outright extorting marijuana companies. So there's been a little bit more dysfunction on that municipal level than was expected. That's kind of where people are going for these corrections. One thing the bill might actually finally give the green-light to is on-site social consumption in towns that want to adopt that. You'll be able to, in some places, buy marijuana and then have a lounge area or something in which to consume it.
Yuill: Has anything changed as far as public safety around marijuana goes? Are lawmakers looking to implement anything they've learned about how and when people get high?
Deehan: Yeah. Most notable on the public safety front is a bill pushed by Gov. Baker to rewrite the DUI laws. Baker says that police just don't have the right tools to identify drugged drivers. It boils down to the fact that there's no breathalyzer for weed, it's really only what a police officer can observe from a driver after they're stopped, either in their driving or how they observe their eyes or how they act, how they speak, how they function.
That takes training and new standards that the state would need to get set up, and that's something that Baker has been asking for for years now. Obviously, driving while high is already illegal. But this bill would give kind of automatic license suspensions for refusing a roadside drug test, just like what would happen if you refuse a breathalyzer if you get pulled over. This bill actually came out of a commission that was created when we legalized cannabis at the ballot, back in 2016. It hasn't really gained purchase, though, in the legislature. Some opponents say that it's actually based on junk science, and experts have been saying that even police with all the new modern training often ignore signs of impairment, or they get it wrong and they end up either revoking the licenses or locking people up who didn't actually break the law. Lawmakers actually shelved Baker's bill this year, so it probably won't come up anytime soon unless it's a part of some other kind of negotiation or deal.
Yuill: Speaking of that ballot question in 2016, didn't the legislature make massive changes to the law approved by the voters before any products went on sale?
Deehan: Yeah, it seems like ancient history now, but the legislature really did take the law as approved by voters and rewrote essentially all of it the way they wanted to before it went into place. It really shows the willingness that lawmakers have to take a voter mandate and reshape it. They did everything from changing the taxation scheme to how that regulatory board was set up in that two years between passing [the ballot measure] in 2016 and shops opening in 2018.
Yuill: Now what about the criminal justice side of this, or any other conversation about legalizing drugs? Are there efforts in play to make it more fair for those who may have been involved with marijuana before it became legal?
Deehan: That concept's called expungement — the idea that since it's legal now and pretty much socially acceptable in most places, that people who had previous illegal marijuana offenses would [have them] struck from their record. That's something that criminal justice advocates have been fighting for for years now. It wasn't a part of the major criminal justice reform bill that passed a few years ago, but people are still keeping at it. It would really help a lot of people who got in trouble back in the day for something that the state now makes millions of dollars off of. A lot of people do think this is the direction that we're going to go in, but Beacon Hill likes to tackle things only a few things at a time, and criminal justice? This just isn't the year for it. So even though it's kind of a good idea that has a lot of backing, I think a lot of folks are going to wait until the next big criminal justice bill gets put in play before they move on.
