“Prohibiting the cultivation and sale of marijuana to adults has proven to be ineffective, unfair, and costly policy for the state of Rhode Island,” reads the Senate version of a bill that would tax and regulate marijuana in Rhode Island. The House version will be introduced at an event Thursday, 3:15 at the State House.
If passed, the legislation – sponsored in the Senate by Josh Miller of Cranston, and in the House by Scott Slater of Providence – could make Rhode Island the first state legislature to legalize marijuana. Colorado and Washington both legalized pot in 2014 through a referendum, as did Alaska this winter. Vermont is expected to legalize next year and Washington DC recently did so.
Rhode Island leaders have taken a wait-and-see attitude. But the allure of new tax revenue – a report last year estimated the state could generate $20 to $80 million – and the potential new businesses has been hard to ignore. It’s also a social justice issue as ACLU and NAACP leaders have pointed out that minority populations are disproportionately targeted by marijuana arrests and incarcerations.
“Representative Slater and Senator Miller are introducing a well-crafted, well-researched bill that would end the failed policy of marijuana prohibition in our state,” said Jared Moffat, of Regulate RI, the group advocating for passage of the bill. He said it “includes commonsense public health provisions, such as requiring opaque packing for all marijuana products, limiting edible products to one serving of THC, restricting advertising, and mandating the inclusion of safety inserts with important information about responsible consumption with each marijuana product sold.”
The bill would exempt anyone in Rhode Island from being prosecuted under state drugs laws if they possess up to one ounce of marijuana. It would also allow people to grow indoors one mature marijuana plant.
“Smoking marijuana shall be prohibited in all public places,” says the Senate version of the bill, and it would carry a $250 fine for smoking pot in an indoor public place and a $150 fine for smoking pot at an outdoor public place.
Unless given approval from the state Department of Health, it will still be illegal to sell marijuana. Applying for this approval could cost $5,000, according to the bill, and there will be a $10,000 annual permit to sell marijuana. There is no state limit on the number of businesses that could sell marijuana and the Department of Business Regulation is instructed by the bill to consider at least two. Marijuana retailers would have to include a warning label with their product.
There would be two taxes on legal marijuana; a $50 per ounce excise tax – some 40 percent of which would go to drug and alcohol treatment and prevention while another 10 percent would go to law enforcement – and a 10 percent sales tax.
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Last year the General Assembly unanimously passed the “Environmental Cleanup Objectives for Schools” sponsored by Senator Juan Pichardo and representative Scott Slater. The bill, which took over three years to pass, was signed into law by Governor Chafee on June 6, 2012, nearly a year ago. Commonly referred to as the “School Siting Law,” this was an important and landmark piece of legislation that prohibits school construction on contaminated sites where there is ongoing potential for vapor intrusion.
This common sense piece of legislation, that keeps our children from attending schools where toxic gases can wreak havoc on their health, is doubly important because the bodies of children are still developing, and triply important in poorer communities where children already face greater levels of hazardous environmental poisons such as lead.
It’s therefore even more baffling that this legislation is being challenged and potentially weakened by two new bills that have been introduced to the General assembly, House Bill 5617 and Senate Bill 520. These bills would allow construction of schools on vapor intrusion sites, completely gutting the intent of the original bill. This legislation is being introduced on behalf of the Rhode Island Mayoral Academies (RIMA),which wants to expand a charter school on potentially hazardous land.
RIMA wants to manage the contamination by leaving it in the ground, and then monitoring the vapor intrusion with sophisticated and largely untested technologies that they hope will protect children, teachers and staff from unhealthy levels of exposure to toxins. The technology and monitoring will be an additional expense that the school will have to manage, money that will not go towards education.
A press conference was held on the RI State House steps yesterday by Clean Water Action, the Childhood Lead Action Project and the Environmental Justice League of RI that featured Lois Gibbs, renowned toxics activist from Love Canal who famously helped kickstart the United States Superfund Program. Gibbs pointed out that the legislation RIMA wishes to undermine has become model legislation for similar laws across the country, from New York and Massachusetts to Michigan.
“The very thing that they are talking about changing in this bill is what happened at Love Canal,” said Gibbs. “It was vapor intrusion! So why would this group of people want to put Love Canal under the school of innocent children is beyond me.”
This would be a great question to pose to Senator Juan Pichardo, who helped shepherd the bill through the Senate last session and has now introduced the legislation to destroy it. Why Pichardo would stand up for students one year and then seek to allow RIMA the right to ignore sensible safety protocols and endanger our student’s health might be another reason to take a long look at corporately funded charter schools and the ways in which corporate money warps government.
Pichardo’s email is sen-pichardo@rilin.state.ri.us and his official phone number is (401) 461-2389 if you think this is an issue important enough to let him know how you feel.
Why would we want to undo such awesome legislation? Watch Lois Gibbs explain:
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