An online forum hosted by The Community Voice on 420 Day brought together advocates, legislators, and business leaders to discuss the ongoing effort to legalize medical marijuana in Kansas and to discuss what equitable involvement from communities of color should look like.
State Rep. Ford Carr and state Sen. Mary Ware provided updates on the legislative process so far and why Kansas remains one of just 12 states without any form of legalized marijuana use.
“It’s Senate leadership and the majority party” blocking previous bills, Ware said of the repeated failures to pass medical marijuana laws despite years of trying.
The latest bills to get a hearing, Senate Bills 555 and 135, were criticized by advocates as overly restrictive and costly.
“They have very limited number of conditions and ailments that will allow folks to access medical cannabis,” said Ware. “Both bills make it very expensive to get into the industry.”
A major topic was ensuring racial equity and participation from Black residents, businesses, and communities disproportionately impacted by marijuana criminalization.
“Unless there is social equity included in a medical marijuana bill, in my opinion, that bill can die,” said one forum participant. “
Cheryl Kumberg, president of the Kansas Cannabis Coalition, which started as a nurses’ group advocating for medical access to marijuana, outlined patient priorities like allowances for home growing and different consumption methods as important to her organization.
Bills considered this year severely limited ways individuals could consume marijuana. Neither bill allowed for smoking marijuana. While one bill allowed consumption of gummies, another bill only allowed consumption as pills or via ointments.
“It’s not a one-size-fits-all thing,” said Kumberg. “Situations vary from rural to urban and everybody even reacts to cannabis differently because we are inherently just different human beings.”
The group discussed the importance of having measures in the bill that:
- Expunge and/or exonerate individuals who are currently serving time or who were previously convicted on marijuana charges.
- Allow for individuals to grow a certain number of plants for their own consumption.
- An affordable option for small, Kansas and minority businesses to participate economically in the industry.
The group agreed it’s important to get grassroot individuals involved in advocating for and passage of marijuana legislation, through petitions, voting and advocacy.
The group agreed, another path forward would be collaborating with groups already working on this issue and particularly those already with lobbyists on the ground in Topeka.
“The way the system works right now, you know, the lobbyists are the ones who are working directly with the legislators,” said Carr.
Law enforcement involvement was cited as crucial as well, after Carr shared that the head of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation agreed to work on a framework they could accept. “If our law enforcement people are saying that, hey, if we did it this way, we could make this work,” it would be harder for opposition, Carr explained.
Finally, the group agreed that one of the important things to do was to vote individuals out of office who haven’t been supportive and to vote in people who will support legalization.
Top among those who need to be ousted, advocates say, is Ty Masterson, a Republican from El Dorado who is president of the Senate. According to Ware, he is the major person holding up passage of medical marijuana legislation.
“The power is and has always been with the people,” Carr said of the opposition. “We simply have to get candidates and just vote them out.”