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SALT LAKE CITY — As a bill to delay implementation of ballot initiatives awaits a vote in the Senate today, advocates and backers of the bid to legalize marijuana for medical use in Utah are alone in raising their voices against the late-session legislation.
Organizers and advocates for the Utah Medical Cannabis Act say that's because a bill passed late Monday night in the House would substantially impact only that ballot measure.
And backers of the remaining initiatives concurred late Wednesday, telling the Deseret News they're not worried about Rep. Brad Daw's HB471 because it wouldn't delay their respective ballot measures much.
DJ Schanz, director of the Utah Patients Coalition ballot initiative, said he doesn't "have a crystal ball" to understand the exact reasons for the bill other than to delay provisions of the Utah Medical Cannabis Act, which will likely appear on the ballot in November, and perhaps alter parts of it before it has the chance to go into effect.
"I don't know what the intents or motives are, but I can say (the bill) does directly affect us and we see them targeting us for sure," Schanz said. "Because the other ballot initiatives are not affected by this delayed implementation, (since) their ballot initiatives don't go … into effect upon passage. They're already delayed."
“It feels leveled just against the medical cannabis initiative,” said Thomas Paskett, policy director for Together For Responsible Use and Cannabis Education, or TRUCE.
HB471 would delay the implementation of all voter-approved ballot initiatives until 60 days after the end of the next legislative session, unless the initiative specifies a later implementation date.
But of the six ballot initiatives currently gathering signatures for inclusion on November 2018 ballots, only the medicinal cannabis measure would be significantly delayed by the latest version of HB471.
It would delay by at least six months the implementation of a provision called "affirmative defense," which gives those who use cannabis a legal defense against prosecution for marijuana-related charges, explained Christine Stenquist, founder and president of the cannabis group.
Daw denied allegations that his bill singles out the medicinal cannabis initiative, saying HB471 only serves a practical legal need that ballot initiatives often create. He also denied that his bill was seeking to thwart the will of the people or make it harder to pass ballot initiatives.
Daw and Rep. Norm Thurston, R-Provo, defended HB471 at length on the House floor earlier this week, saying it was a “minimum delay” that "does not raise the bar by 1 millimeter" in terms of the standard of getting an initiative on the ballot. The bill simply seeks to give the Legislature time to appropriate funds and smooth out potential legal conflicts in a year with so many competing ballot initiatives, they said.
Under current law, ballot initiatives go into effect five days after the governor certifies the results of the canvass, which usually lands on Dec. 1, according to a spokesman from the state elections office.
HB471 would push back the effective date until sometime in May. For any ballot initiatives passed in November 2018, that date would be May 12, 2019.
Our Schools Now, the ballot initiative that seeks to raise taxes to provide more funding for public education, would have been impacted by a previous version of HB471, delaying its implementation.
That measure and any other ballot initiative that raises taxes would have been pushed back to the January following the next legislative session after the canvass, which would be January 2020 for such initiatives approved in 2018. The bill was amended, though, to no longer push back the date for initiatives that seek to raise taxes.
Our Schools Now also has a deal in the works with lawmakers that would end that initiative and replace it with an opinion question that asks voters whether they want the state's gas tax increased by 10 cents a gallon. HB491 sets up a one-time process for the ballot question, and HJR20 provides the language for the question that would be asked in November.
Utah Decides Healthcare, an initiative to put the question of full Medicaid expansion on the ballot, has an April 2019 implementation date and would not be delayed by HB471 by more than a few weeks, according to an initiative spokesman.
The Better Boundaries initiative, which seeks to fight gerrymandering, has no implementation date, and the redistricting process contemplated by the petition won’t begin until after the 2020 U.S. Census, according to an initiative official.
Count My Vote and Keep My Voice are conflicting initiatives dealing with the ongoing controversy over Utah's caucus and convention system for nominating candidates and the signature-gathering route to the ballot. Count My Vote officials told the Deseret News that its initiative would not take effect until the 2020 election cycle, meaning it would not be delayed by HB471.
A spokesman for Keep My Voice declined to comment on HB471 Wednesday night, saying he hadn't even heard of the bill.
HB471 passed 46-25 in the House late Monday night, after failing moments earlier by a 34-39 vote. The bill was brought back to the floor for further debate, resulting in another vote that now sends HB471 to the Senate.
Without the impact of HB471 looming over it, the Medical Cannabis Act ballot initiative — if passed by voters — would go into effect five days after the governor certifies the results of the election in November.
The proposed ballot initiative would allow patients with Crohn's disease, PTSD, epilepsy, cancer, Alzheimer's or any of multiple other conditions to apply for a medical cannabis card to allow them access to medicinal marijuana. The initiative would also allow for the opening of several cannabis dispensaries throughout the state.
The deadline for Utah to begin issuing medical marijuana cards wouldn't be until 2020, but affirmative defense would kick in immediately while the rest of the ballot initiative gets implemented over time.
Officials with Together For Responsible Use and Cannabis Education worry that delaying implementation of the medicinal cannabis measure would allow the Legislature to gut the initiative during the 2019 legislative session.
Daw is the sponsor or co-sponsor of several cannabis-related bills this session:
• SB130 allows the state to regulate CBD products derived from the hemp plant. That bill has passed in both the House and Senate and awaits the governor's signature.
• HB197 allows the state to set up dispensaries and grow cannabis for research and also allows individuals to possess it for academic or research purposes without running afoul of the federal Controlled Substances Act. That bill also has passed in both the House and Senate and goes to the governor.
• And HB195 is a "right to try" law that allows terminally ill patients to use medicinal cannabis if they have "an incurable and irreversible disease that has been medically confirmed" and who likely have six months or less to live. HB195 passed the Senate on Wednesday by a 20-5 vote.
The cannabis group contends that Daw is trying to head off the medicinal cannabis initiative through HB471 in favor of his less comprehensive bills passed this session that don't allow for the latitude of marijuana use among Utahns that would be legal under the initiative.
House Minority Leader Brian King, D-Salt Lake City, expressed similar suspicion about HB471, saying Daw has for a number of years tried to regulate cannabis-related products and restrict their legalization.
King said HB471 is going to strike a lot of people as suspicious.
“I generally think that the Legislature is not anxious to interfere with the will of the people as expressed in these initiatives," King told the Deseret News.
Daw told the News that if the Legislature wanted to modify legislation created by a ballot initiative, “they can do that anyway" during the general session or a special session.
"(HB471) neither allows nor denies the Legislature the ability to modify an initiative," he said. "What it’s doing is saying, ‘OK, look. If you ask for money or anything like that, or there’s a conflict, give us a chance to straighten it out.' That’s all. It doesn’t stop the initiative. It doesn’t make it any harder to get it on the ballot. It doesn’t prevent the people from voting for it."
Daw said there's an unusually high number of ballot initiatives this year, and the potential for conflict with existing legislation moving through the Capitol might be why so many people are feeling "picked on."
He speculated that in any other year, HB471 would "fly through" the legislative session without controversy. He said the legal complexity of having this many ballot initiatives warrants his bill.
But Daw admitted he does have concerns at least about the legal complexity of the "affirmative defense" part of the cannabis initiative.
“Frankly, I’ve had prosecutors tell me that (affirmative defense) is a real problem,” he said. “There’s no affirmative defense law right now. That’s in the initiative. So if the (cannabis) initiative passes, then there’s an affirmative defense law that prosecutors, at a minimum, are not quite sure how to respond to.
“(HB471) might give us chance to decide if that is a problem. It may not be. I don’t know. The initiative people think it’s not (a problem). The prosecutors think it is. Let’s all sit down together and make sure we understand whether it is or not.”
Overall, Daw said HB471 is "just a matter of being responsible, both fiscally and policy-wise."
But Stenquist says Daw is sponsoring HB471 at the expense of people who can be medically benefitted by cannabis.
"I have a brain tumor,” she said. “My tumor doesn’t go away when I cross state lines. I still need access to cannabis.”
Schanz said the medical cannabis campaign has gathered 160,000 signatures to put the issue on the ballot — far more than the 113,000 called for by statute — but they are still "tying up some loose ends" in a few Senate districts to make sure they are meeting every requirement.
If voters pass the medical cannabis initiative, the affirmative defense provision is enacted immediately. But if HB471 prevails, medicinal cannabis users will have to wait before they can use that affirmative defense, even if voters approve the initiative.
"Patients who otherwise have been waiting for years to have access to their medicine are then able to be found prosecutable even though the law is passed," Schanz said. "Because there's no system and infrastructure set up … it's going to take a year and a half to (establish)." Email: pcathcart@deseretnews.com; blockhart@deseretnews.com Twitter: DNewsPolitics
