A GOP senator says marijuana rescheduling and industry banking legislation are “half-assed measures,” and lawmakers should instead focus on legalizing cannabis under a federal regulatory framework similar to alcohol and tobacco. He also argued that hemp-derived products that are available in states across the country are “more harmful” than marijuana itself.
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That position distinguishes Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) from the vast majority of other members of the Republican caucus who oppose cannabis legalization.
But in an interview with AskAPol that was published on Tuesday, Tillis said “I think we’re reaching a point to where we’ve got to take a look” at comprehensive reform.
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The Biden administration’s efforts to reclassify cannabis as a Schedule III drug under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA)—as well as a bipartisan marijuana banking bill that moved through a committee he sits on last year—”are all half-measures—we could even argue half-assed measures,” he said.
“We probably need to look at a federal comprehensive framework to deal with the banking issues and scheduling issues,” Tillis said. “But I think, in my opinion, we need a federal regimen that’s not unlike what we have for tobacco and alcohol, where you authenticate the crops on the front end, you mandate flavorings and delivery methods through the FDA and you allow banking.”
Without creating “one consistent framework” for marijuana, “we’re dancing around the issue,” he said.
Tillis added that he’s doesn’t necessarily mean cannabis needs to be federally legalized, but the federal government should at least play a role in regulating state marijuana markets. And he said he’s “really worried” that if incremental reforms such as rescheduling and banking go forward, “it’s going to be at the expense of people truly understanding the dangers out there” with hemp-derived products such as CBD, which he said “are more harmful than marijuana flower.”
Asked whether he’s support the Secure and Fair Enforcement Regulation (SAFER) Banking Act if it came to a vote now, the senator said “no,” arguing that that enacting the modest banking reform would move Congress “further away from a comprehensive framework.”
“I think all that stuff has its place in a framework that also ensures that you don’t have the cartels making money by getting caught into the supply chain—and they are—and then you’ve got the off-the-books people,” he said.
Tillis voted against a cannabis banking bill in the Senate Banking Committee last year.
In the new AskAPol interview, the senator claimed that California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has been “kind of silent on this, because he happens to have a lot of people that are making a lot of money off the books and getting it into the system.”
“It all needs to be regulated, and my focus is on capturing the revenue that we should probably capture through an excise tax and dealing with all the negative consequences,” Tillis said.
The senator first discussed his support for creating a federal regulatory scheme for marijuana in an interview with Green Market Report in July, affirming that there should be a framework that “treats marijuana just like tobacco.”
Despite his position, in April Tillis joined Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) in asking federal, state and local officials what steps they were taking to enforce marijuana prohibition as an Indian tribe prepared to launch recreational cannabis sales on its lands within North Carolina.
Meanwhile, back in 2017, Tillis also teamed up with bipartisan colleagues on a bill that was meant to ease researchers’ access to marijuana for studies on its medical benefits and require the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to develop recommendations for good manufacturing practices for growing and producing cannabis for research.
Making the senator’s comments all the more significant is the fact that his state of North Carolina is among the minority that does not even have a comprehensive medical marijuana program in place.
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