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New Initiative To Legalize Marijuana Sales Filed In D.C.

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Activists recently filed a new proposed ballot initiative to legalize marijuana sales in Washington, D.C.

The measure—titled the “New Modern Day Cannabis Justice Reform Act”—would end prosecutions of cannabis cultivation, sales and consumption. It would also prevent marijuana from being the basis of police searches and provide for expungements of prior cannabis convictions.

District voters approved a measure to legalize low-level marijuana possession and home cultivation in 2014, but the city has been prevented from implementing a retail model due to a congressional rider barring it from using local tax dollars for such purposes. It stands to reason that the new proposal would run into the same problem, but activists say they plan to push ahead regardless.

Dawn Lee-Carty, executive director of the campaign behind this initiative, told Marijuana Moment in a phone interview that the currently unregulated cannabis system that’s in place has failed to address the problem of racially disproportionate enforcement, with arrests still occurring and putting people at risk of contracting the coronavirus.

“Our goal is to push hard and—if we have to take it to Congress, whatever levels that we have to take—to ensure that it is a different cannabis climate for the safety of the patient, for the economy, for those who run a participate and want to be store owners for cannabis, we should have access just like big moneyed interests have access without being washed out,” she said.

Lee-Carty said that, ideally, the measure would appear on the November ballot this year. It’s fairly late in the process at this point, but the Board of Elections is scheduled to meet to determine whether the initiative meets the standards of relevant subject matter for initiatives on September 2.

To qualify for the ballot, activists would have to collect 24,835 valid signatures from registered voters—just as a separate campaign to decriminalize a wide range of psychedelics successfully did. The marijuana campaign has not started formally gathering signatures, but it did circulate an independent petition that advocates say amassed about 40,000 signatures from individuals who would presumably be inclined to sign the official form.

“This initiative legalizes the possession, to the extent possible by current law the use, sale, and purchase of cannabis and CBD products for any person over the age of 21 or older,” text of the measure states. “Where not possible the initiative will make police enforcement and prosecution the lowest priority. Reverting to law automatically the soonest date possible in the future.”

The proposal also contains several noteworthy provisions such as requiring that, in order to obtain a marijuana business license, individuals must have resided in D.C. for at least two years. Those on parole would also be eligible, the measure states.

“We don’t want outsiders to come in and take over our business. It’s already happened. It’s already here,” Lee-Cary said, referring to the district’s existing medical cannabis program. “You have a lot of out-of-state, people that come in—big money interests that come in—and they sweep up the opportunities that people in our community could have.”

There’s also a ban on vertical integration included in the measure, preventing companies from multiple stages of production and sales so that the local industry would be more diverse and less at risk of monopolization.

Another unique provision would make it so police dogs “previously trained to detect cannabis will be retrained to detect explosives, weapons of mass destruction, and firearms so as to protect our schools, malls, mass gatherings, from foreign and domestic foreign terrorism.”

“Dogs are trained to sniff marijuana, but meanwhile we have bombs, we have school shootings, we have so many other things that are in play right now that I think that we should redirect the funding for dogs—once again removing police and all police-related things, including dogs—out of the cannabis industry or out of the cannabis climate if it’s legal,” Lee-Carty said.

Read the text of the proposed D.C. marijuana sales legalization measure below: 

Dc Marijuana Initiative by Marijuana Moment on Scribd

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Photo courtesy of WeedPornDaily.

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Kyle Jaeger is Marijuana Moment's Sacramento-based managing editor. His work has also appeared in High Times, VICE and attn.

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