"The patients who suffer daily have already had their will overturned by a technicality. If the legislature does not pass SB 2095, they are simply pushing patients to the illicit market," said Kevin Caldwell, MPP's Southeast legislative manager.
"The bottom line is possession and cultivation by adults is already legal. The governor has said he won’t seek to overturn the law on personal possession. I doubt he could do so if he wanted to because it’s already law and the Democrat-controlled Senate is still in power, and I don’t think they’d reverse themselves because he wanted them to. But the details of how the regulated system will operate are still very much in question and haven’t been signed off on. Any of that could change," said Karen O'Keefe, MPP's director of state policies.
"People lose the opportunity to get jobs, to get housing. To get educational assistance. These are key things that can haunt people for the rest of their lives for something that is legal in 18 states," said Kevin Caldwell, MPP's Southeast legislative manager.
"In many instances the new revenue is being distributed to much-needed public services and programs, including reinvesting in communities that were devastated by the war on drugs," said Karen O'Keefe, MPP's director of state policies.
"By and large, elected officials are starting to realize that this is where the public sentiment is," said Karen O'Keefe, MPP's director of state policies.
"It is the slowest of any state," said Karen O’Keefe, director of state policies for the Marijuana Policy Project, based in Washington, D.C. "State legislators legalized medical cannabis in 2017, but the first dispensaries didn’t open until November 2021 because of banking issues."
Legal adult-use marijuana in Massachusetts has become a cash crop with sales topping the $2.28 billion mark in 2021. The Marijuana Policy Project released a new report showing tax revenue generated from states where marijuana is legal has surpassed $10.4 billion in tax revenue from sales through December 2021.
Michigan has collected about $271 million in legal, adult-use marijuana tax revenue since 2019, according to a new report from the Marijuana Policy Project that analyzed tax revenue in states with adult-use cannabis since 2014.