A South Dakota legislative committee has rejected a bill that would have reversed the state’s voter-approved legalization of medical marijuana. The panel did advance separate legislation however, to remove a legal defense for medical cannabis patients who don’t have registry identification cards.
If enacted, HB 1101, from Rep. Travis Ismay (R), would have repealed South Dakota’s medical cannabis statutes altogether, effectively ending the program. On Tuesday, however, the House Health and Human Services voted 7 to 6 to kill the measure.
Prior to being elected to the legislature last year, Ismay unsuccessfully sought to place an initiative on the 2024 ballot to scrap the state’s medical marijuana law. Now, his bill to do the same has stalled.
Ahead of the vote, the lawmaker told colleagues on Tuesday that there is no difference between medical cannabis and recreational marijuana, saying they are “the same thing.”
“I know you’re going to hear a whole lot of testimony about how medical marijuana saved people’s lives, but I’ll tell you something. I have a daughter that it destroyed her life—absolutely destroyed it,” Ismay said.
“If you promote something as a medicine and say, ‘there’s no no bad side effects, it’s perfectly harmless,’ kids are going to try it,” he said. “My kid did, and it wasn’t the last thing she tried. It was a stepping stool, to the next bad drug and the next bad drug. It’s a horrible thing.”
Other lawmakers and opposition witnesses argued that it would be inappropriate for the legislature to overturn the will of voters to approved the legalization of medical cannabis on the ballot in 2020.
“We had voters that voted on a medical marijuana program, and I want to respect the voters in that,” Rep. Taylor Rehfeldt (R) said.
To the extent Ismay and other have concerns about the way cannabis access has rolled out in the state, she said they should bring them to an oversight committee that’s tasked with making changes to the program.
“There is an ability to compromise. There is an ability for the parties to come to the table,” Rehfeldt said. “But this is just too extreme. This just removes an industry that has come into the state, that has been established, that has worked very hard to make sure that patients have accessibility.”
Liz Tiger of the advocacy organization New Approach South Dakota told committee members that she uses medical cannabis to treat systemic scleroderma.
“Living on opioids is not a life. I cannot tolerate Tylenol, and my rheumatologist has advised that NSAIDs like ibuprofen are not appropriate for me,” she said.
The medical cannabis program gives her access to effective products and “protects me from arrest, all of which enable me to show up fully for my family, my business and my career as a community organizer,” Tiger said. “I’m not alone. Approximately 11,000 patients rely on this program, just as I do.”
The South Dakota Defense Lawyers Association’s Terra Larson pointed out that if lawmakers repealed the medical marijuana law, “people have the choice between having their pain alleviated or becoming criminals.”
She noted that felony charges would then apply for people who are currently legal patients.
“When we are thinking about building a multi-million-dollar prison in this state, and we are thinking about wanting to add all of these additional felonies and potential felons in our state, we’ve got to really think of where we’re going to put them,” Larson said. “There’s been extensive discussion about, when this prison is built, that it’s going to be 90 percent full. If we add, theoretically, 11,000 new felons, where are we going to put them?”
Moments later, Ismay pushed back, saying that he’s heard marijuana reform supporters say that the substance “isn’t habit forming.”
“So then just stop smoking weed,” the GOP lawmaker said in defense of his bill. “You won’t go to prison. Just kind of an easy fix, I think, if it’s not addictive.”
Moments after killing Ismay’s repeal legislation, the committee did approve a separate bill from the lawmaker, however, to remove the ability of patients who don’t have registry identification cards to raise a legal defense in court to avoid being convicted of violating the state’s marijuana laws.
That measure advanced on a 9 to 4 vote.
While South Dakota voters approved the medical marijuana law with nearly 70 percent support in 2020, Ismay first tried to reverse the reform as a citizen, filing an initiative that he sought to place on the 2024 ballot. The state attorney general released a final summary of the proposal, but it did not ultimately qualify.
Prior to the election, backers of a separate ballot measure to legalize adult-use cannabis in South Dakota—which voters rejected last November—had called on state officials to scuttle Ismay’s initiative. South Dakotans for Better Marijuana Laws argued that petitions in support of the medical cannabis repeal measure failed to follow state requirements.
With respect to adult-use legalization efforts in the state, former Gov. Kristi Noem (R)—who was recently confirmed to lead the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the second Trump administration—was among the opponents of the reform proposal. In a video ad released last year, she urged constituents to reject the reform initiative, stating that it’s “not good for our kids” and won’t “improve our communities.”
“The fact is, I’ve never met someone who got smarter from smoking pot,” the former governor said at the time.
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After voters approved medical cannabis legalization in 2020, Noem tried to get the legislature to approve a bill to delay implementation for an additional year. But while it cleared the House, negotiators were unable to reach an agreement with the Senate in conference, delivering a defeat to the governor.
In response, Noem’s office started exploring a compromise, with one proposal that came out of her administration to decriminalize possession of up to one ounce of cannabis, limit the number of plants that patients could cultivate to three and prohibit people under 21 from qualifying for medical marijuana.
In the 2022 legislative session, the House rejected a legalization bill that the Senate had passed, effectively leaving it up to activists to get on the ballot again.
A Marijuana Interim Study Committee, headed by legislative leaders, was established to explore cannabis policy reform, and the panel in November 2021 recommended that the legislature take up legalization. The House-defeated legislation was one of the direct products of that recommendation.
North Dakota Lawmakers Approve Bill To Expand Marijuana Decriminalization, Making Low-Level Possession A $150 Citation
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