Legalized recreational marijuana is on Pennsylvania's doorstep

Recreational marijuana remains illegal in Pennsylvania. But lawmakers, advocates and even opponents who have spent countless hours debating the topic in Harrisburg say that likely will change soon.

Money, specifically the promise of jobs and new tax revenue, has come to dominate the conversation in the General Assembly.

Like the debate over casino gambling, which became legal in Pennsylvania in 2004, the push for legalizing recreational marijuana has been percolating in the Legislature for years.

Former Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf announced five years ago that he would have approved it had the General Assembly sent him a legalization bill. Such measures gathered more momentum last winter when Gov. Josh Shapiro included it in his budget proposal.

Shapiro, also a Democrat, cited the potential for $41 million in new tax revenue during the first year of legal recreational marijuana and predicted it would generate nearly $300 million a year once the multibillion-dollar industry became fully legal here.

This month, Shapiro told TribLive he will call for recreational cannabis legalization as part of his next budget proposal.

“I think it is an issue of fairness, justice and competitiveness,” Shapiro said during a Dec. 3 stop in Pittsburgh. “All the states around us have approved or are in the process of approving recreational marijuana. Folks are going across state borders in order to purchase it and paying taxes to those states. They should be keeping their money right here in Pennsylvania.”

Those who sat on the sidelines during the protracted battle for casino gambling said the parallels in the debate are unmistakable.

Alison Dagnes, a political scientist at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, said, like casino gambling, which followed the lottery and small games of chance into law, the potential for recreational marijuana became apparent when a less-expansive law legalized medicinal marijuana.

“Both of these got a foothold that way,” Dagnes said. “They sort of slid you in with medical marijuana like they slid you in with small games of chance for gambling. You try a little bit for free — it’s an analogy for the money to be made. And when the carrot for legal marijuana gets so big Bugs Bunny can’t ignore it, it becomes a thing.”

Pressure not to be left behind also is building. Recreational marijuana is legal in six of seven states surrounding Pennsylvania — Ohio, Maryland, Delaware, New York, New Jersey and Virginia. It is approved for medicinal use in neighboring West Virginia.

“Because gambling and marijuana are legalized in so many other states, there’s so much money, you can’t ignore it,” Dagnes said. “You could look at them and see it as manna from heaven or a cautionary tale. And since states (that have legalized it) have no imperative to highlight the negative, other states start falling like dominoes.”

The focus on money has only grown. Twenty-five states have legalized adult-use recreational marijuana, including Ohio and Delaware, where sales began this year. The Marijuana Policy Project, which tracks sales and tax revenue by state, reported that states with legal adult-use marijuana sales collected more than $4 billion in tax revenue on such sales in 2023.

In Ohio, where legal sales began in August, state officials reported more than $203 million in recreational cannabis sales in the first four months of the program. With the state’s 10% excise tax on recreational cannabis sales, that amounts to just over $20 million in tax revenue for Ohio so far this year.

States with a longer history of recreational marijuana sales boast significant tax hauls. In 2023 alone, California collected just over $1 billion in taxes on recreational marijuana, Michigan $473 million and Illinois $552 million.

In Pennsylvania, where officials will have the benefit of their neighbors’ experience, issues such as criminal justice reform, the disproportionate impact marijuana laws have had on minority communities and expunging the records of thousands whose lives are still weighed down by low-level marijuana convictions remain part of the conversation.

Nonetheless, dollar signs were a big feature in the final days of the Legislature’s spring session when state Reps. Emily Kinkead, D-Pittsburgh, and Aaron Kaufer, R-Luzerne, answered Shapiro’s call with a 220-page bipartisan recreational marijuana bill that largely mirrored a bipartisan measure long languishing in the Senate.

A large placard featured prominently in the rollout of the House measure boasted it could bring in up to $420 million a year in new taxes and 33,000 new jobs.

Three years earlier, when state Sens. Sharif Street, D-Philadelphia, and Dan Laughlin, R-Erie, unveiled a bipartisan measure, they focused on increasing public support for adult-use recreational marijuana, the failed war on drugs and the growing cost of incarcerating thousands for marijuana-related offenses.

Buried low in their pitch were estimates that the new industry could bring in anywhere from $400 million to $1 billion.

In the interim, the industry, which gained a foothold in the state with the legalization of medical marijuana in 2016, has become a player in the conversation, looking to participate in an expanded marketplace. Since 2016, the state has recorded $7.3 billion in total sales and nearly $110 million in tax revenue, which peaked at $35.5 million in 2021, according to Pennsylvania Department of Health data.

State Rep. Dan Frankel, D-Squirrel Hill, a 13-term lawmaker and longtime advocate for recreational marijuana who convened a series of hearings in the House in 2023, is among those who say it will happen. He plans to introduce in the next legislative session, which begins in January, a bill to legalize recreational marijuana.

Frankel has stressed the need to change laws that have disproportionately affected poor communities and minorities and stressed the capacity of jails and prisons.

Frankel’s bill would legalize recreational marijuana for adults 21 and older, per his office.

Public health, economic justice for those individuals and communities, protecting Pennsylvania’s regulated medical marijuana markets and tapping new tax revenues are among his concerns.

But Frankel said growing pressure to fall in line with surrounding states is moving the issue now.

“The bottom line is we’re in an environment where the toothpaste is out of the tube and you can’t put it back,” Frankel said. “Every state around us has had a legal market, and some of them not very well regulated. And, in addition to that, you have an illicit market that is thriving with all of the stores that are selling unregulated products, eating into legal medical marijuana sales.

“There’s clearly an environment where it just doesn’t make sense to not move ahead with adult recreational-use cannabis. We’ve had at least 20 hours of hearings and internally within caucus trying to educate members.”

Those hearings highlighted a host of issues. Everything from market regulation and licensing growers and dispensaries to allowing disadvantaged communities and individuals, including those with low-level marijuana convictions, to participate in the market was addressed.

Lawmakers also discussed including unregulated THC products, such as Delta 8, in the new law and expunging the criminal records of those convicted of nonviolent marijuana violations. They weighed in on enforcing laws against black-market marijuana and the need for guardrails to protect children and public health.

Witnesses at House hearings included medical and legal experts as well as industry participants from other states and Canada.

Risks of legalization

Some cautioned against legalization. They cited the increasing potency of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in the drug, and the dangers it poses to mental health of developing youth as well as the threat of black-market marijuana versus pricier, regulated products.

State Rep. Kathy Rapp, R-Warren, minority chair of the House Health Committee, is against legalization but conceded change may be coming.

“Looking at other states that legalized it, the revenue added is minuscule and the danger to our youth and our mental health system far outweighs that,” she said. “But I live very close to the New York border, and I know our constituents are going to New York buying and coming back to Pennsylvania. Should people be in prison for life for marijuana? I agree that should not be the case.”

Kent Vrana, chair of the Department of Pharmacology at Penn State University, testified in last year’s state House hearings on recreational use.

He is personally opposed but recognizes that legalization eventually will happen in Pennsylvania. He thinks the Legislature should enact safeguards to ensure safety for adults and, especially, children.

“If you want to unwind at the end of the day with a joint, that is fine, but as soon as we legalize, it makes it seem OK to the youth to join in,” Vrana said.

Vrana said legalization in other states has led to a potency arms race in which some cannabis products are 10 times stronger than in years past. He said increased use among younger people has correlated to higher rates of schizophrenia later in life.

He is also worried that full legalization will encourage more use that can impact workplaces negatively because he said it will be harder to track people using on the job, especially if they are consuming edibles or pills.

AP

Jars of marijuana line a shelf at The Flower Shop Dispensary in Sioux Falls, S.D.

All these factors should be addressed before the state moves forward with legalization, Vrana said, but he noted that good regulation can be accomplished, especially if the state ensures that only Pennsylvania-made products are sold and distributed through state-run facilities, similar to liquor stores.

He said that would give the state more control over distribution and help keep overly potent products out of the state’s supply chain.

“It can be done, to regulate,” Vrana said. “The key is to require that the product be made in Pennsylvania and it is under the same regulations as medical marijuana.”

Jeff Hanley of the Beaver County-based Commonwealth Prevention Alliance said there is too much focus on the revenue side of legalizing marijuana and not enough discussion of the costs and burdens of increased mental health issues.

“There are big mental health implications,” Hanley said. “We have a mental health problem in this country, and there is clear evidence that marijuana makes this worse.”

A 2023 Columbia University study found that teens who use cannabis only recreationally are two to four times more likely to develop psychiatric disorders, including depression and suicidality, than teenagers who don’t use cannabis at all.

Hanley also is concerned about how the state will enforce impaired driving laws related to marijuana use, noting that testing is inconsistent.

“We just don’t have an honest conversation around this at all,” Haley said. “We need to be able to talk about the benefits and the impacts, so the public can understand what is coming.”

Law enforcement opposition

For some who have enforced drug laws and prosecuted offenders, the proposed changes are a bitter pill.

There is no question of the harm marijuana can cause, Westmoreland County District Attorney Nicole Ziccarelli said. Last year, she was faced with weighing charges against a devastated young couple whose 3-month-old died while sleeping in their bed when they fell asleep after sharing a marijuana cigarette.

Ziccarelli passed on prosecuting the couple, saying “there are many factors to consider in the pursuit of justice.” But she said she will never support recreational marijuana.

Shane Dunlap | TribLive

Pittsburgh police Sgt. Andrew Robinson releases a man from being temporarily detained on June 8 after he failed to produce identification for a marijuana citation as bars begin closing along East Carson Street in the South Side.

“I find it a tragic and unnecessary death. We have an innocent infant who is not with us anymore. … It should matter to all of us that it is happening to children,” she told TribLive.

Ziccarelli and former Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, who served as a federal prosecutor and Pennsylvania attorney general, predicted the black market for marijuana, currently estimated to be as high as $3 billion a year, would only grow and thrive in competition with pricier, legal recreational marijuana.

That has happened in New York. Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams publicly have called for new controls on illicit marijuana dispensaries, which have been estimated to outnumber licensed outlets by about 3,000 to 66 in New York City alone.

Corbett said his opposition to legalizing marijuana has not changed in the years since he left office.

There is no way to avoid a growing black market after legalization, and the state will need to address increased costs in law enforcement, mental health treatments and addiction services, he said.

“It is easy to say we are going to legalize marijuana, but the devil is in the details,” Corbett said.

Nonetheless, even prosecutors in Pennsylvania seem divided.

Northumberland County District Attorney Michael O’Donnell joined lawmakers in a news conference in June supporting the Kinkead-Kaufer bill. And Kelly Callihan, executive director of the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association, said the group, which has long taken a hard line against recreational marijuana in the past and warned of the danger marijuana poses to children, has not taken an official position in the current debate.

The legal landscape also is shifting at the federal level. The Biden administration moved to reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I controlled substance — in the same class as heroin among drugs considered highly addictive and potentially deadly — to a Schedule III substance with accepted medical uses.

President-elect Donald Trump said in a September social media post that he will continue this effort to move marijuana to Schedule III, as well as support states’ rights to legalize cannabis and congressional efforts to pass marijuana banking laws.

Some predict the debate in Harrisburg will intensify as the state’s fiscal reserves, which provided a cushion for this year’s budget, dwindle. That could winnow the remaining opposition, said Duquesne University law professor Joseph Sabino Mistick.

Mistick, who cut his political teeth as chief of staff to late Pittsburgh Mayor Sophie Masloff, said similar considerations brought conservative lawmakers on board to reduce incarceration rates in the face of rising prison costs.

“Our moral values seem to change with the need for additional revenue,” he said. “There is a certain kind of progress that will only occur if money is tight.”