For years, Minnesota legislators from both political parties with puritanical and law-and-order instincts have fought hard to preserve the prohibition of marijuana, a plant that is much less addictive and lethal than already legalized alcohol.
But marijuana prohibition in Minnesota is now effectively over, kinda sorta. The Star Tribune explains one of the most surprising and senseless moves the Minnesota Legislature has made in my lifetime:
“A new state law took effect July 1 that allows Minnesotans 21 and older to buy certain edibles and beverages containing small amounts of THC, the ingredient in marijuana that produces the high associated with the drug.The new law allows the sale and purchase of edibles — such as gummies, hard candy or chocolates — and beverages that contain up to 5 milligrams of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) per serving and 50 milligrams per package, and no more than 0.3% THC by weight. Products containing THC, as well as those containing cannabidiol (CBD), must be clearly labeled and can only be sold to those 21 and older. Edibles must be in child-proof and tamper-evident packages and carry the label “Keep this product out of reach of children.” Serving sizes must also be clearly defined.
THC products sold in Minnesota must be derived from legally-certified hemp containing no more than 0.3% THC by weight, according to the law. Marijuana flower and all THC-containing products derived from it remain illegal in Minnesota for recreational use.
The law places no limit on how many CBD and THC products can be purchased and does not regulate who can sell them.”
This shocking development is at the same time encouraging and frustrating. Legislators have lots of high-minded (sorry, couldn’t resist) explanations about how they were merely trying to keep Minnesotans safe from low-THC hemp with new regulations. But regardless of actual intent, the Legislature has legalized intoxicating THC products. That’s great for those who partake and don’t want to go to jail, but bad for those who care about sensible public policy.
The Legislature, wanting to show their constituents that they’re being prudent with “low and slow” dosing, essentially created the THC equivalent of 3.2 beer, or beer with no more than 3.2 percent alcohol by weight. Anyone who came of age in the 3.2 era knows that past generations of Americans did street research and discovered a clever workaround for that law: Consume more weak product, and get as wasted as your heart desires.
Similarly, there is a fighting chance that today’s Minnesotans will make a similar discovery about the Legislature’s new half-baked model. Obviously, Minnesota’s relatively low-THC gummies can get you every bit as high as the higher-THC gummies available in states where marijuana is fully legalized. More bites begets more buzz.
Equally stupid, the Minnesota Legislature is also requiring that companies produce the THC-containing gummies in the least efficient, most expensive way possible. In Minnesota, companies are required to make THC-containing gummies out of relatively low-THC hemp plants, instead of high-THC marijuana/cannabis plants.
This is like requiring that companies produce sugar from tomatoes rather than sugar beets. It’s feasible, because tomatoes have a relatively small amount of sugar in them, but why do it that way? The massive inefficiency of this hemp requirement ultimately causes huge additional growing and processing costs to be passed on to inflation-weary Minnesota consumers, for no good reason.
But that’s not all. Because legislative hemp regulators quietly snuck into the back door of THC edible legalization without wanting to wake sleeping prohibitionists, they didn’t include any taxation provisions in the new law. As a result, hundreds of millions of dollars in THC product taxes will not be collected to fund badly needed public services, such as education, early learning, or environmental protections. That’s a huge missed opportunity.
Worst of all, the Legislature didn’t expunge the criminal records of Minnesotans whose lives are being needlessly harmed because of past marijuana-related convictions. As of July 1, 2022, Minnesotans can now legally get high as the IDS Tower at the same time their fellow Minnesotans — disproportionately people of color, because of shameful racial bias in Minnesota’s law enforcement and judicial systems — continue to be harshly punished for having consumed the very same chemical. That’s layering an outrageous new injustice on top of the outrageous old injustice.
To summarize, Minnesota’s THC edible legalization framework offers a good buzz, but no consumer cost-containment, public improvements, tax relief, or justice. We can now “get stupid,” but we will never get as stupid as this regulatory framework.
Despite all of those flaws, THC edibles are now finally being enjoyed by Minnesotans of all political stripes. Because of that, this product will quickly get more normalized in Minnesota society. As a result, bringing back prohibition, as some Republicans propose, will be more unpopular than ever.
Ultimately, that normalization should pave the way for the future passage of a more thoughtful, comprehensive legalization framework, presuming a wave of extreme marijuana prohibitionists aren’t swept into office in the 2022 midterm elections. That could happen because of voter frustration over crime and inflation, but it won’t be because of this issue. Minnesotans support marijuana legalization by a 14-point margin.
The Minnesota Legislature will probably eventually get to a sane legalization framework that produces lower consumer prices, better funded government services, and justice for thousands. Winston Churchill famously said that “The United States can always be relied upon to do the right thing — having first exhausted all possible alternatives.” Unfortunately, marijuanaphobic Minnesota is currently in the process of exhausting a particularly ludicrous alternative on its path to the right thing.
As someone who has visited dispensaries in a number of states where pot is legal, I can attest that this incredibly sloppy, dead-of-night legislating puts Minnesota so far outside of the policy mainstream that I suspect other states are pissed at its recklessness. My evidence in support of this assertion:
1) Getting into a pot-selling establishment in Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, Colorado or California – the states I have experience with – requires running a security gauntlet that includes controlled access to the facility, multiple ID checks, extensive inventory controls and meticulous documentation of everything. Most of them have armed guards on site. The sellers, manufacturers and growers of the products are further subjected to extensive inspection and reporting requirements including product quality testing, tracking of inventory down to the gram, background checks and more.
By contrast, Minnesota’s law allows almost any commercial establishment to sell these products to anyone who can provide proof of age, products can be consumer-selected in any quantity and no record of the transaction is preserved. I haven’t seen it yet, but I fully expect the neighborhood gas station to be selling them in point-of-sale displays right next to the energy drinks.
As for oversight, there’s effectively none. Responsibility for enforcing the minimal provision of the hemp law rests with the Minnesota Board of Pharmacy – which already has a full regulatory plate overseeing pharmacists – and its two – as in one, two – inspectors.
3) No additional tax revenue. To me this is the most blindingly obvious sign that this law was snuck through as legislators love – even the conservative ones – creating new revenue streams, especially if they’re politically defensible. Want proof? Check out the tax burden on your next car rental (paid by people who – for the most part – don’t vote in the jurisdiction when they rent the car) and on products that fall into the “sin” category (what a quaint concept in 2022) like booze, smokes, luxe items and – yes – pot. No way would they have missed this opportunity unless the bill’s authors knew doing so would have raised the profile of the legislation.
It will be interesting to see what – if anything – the legislature does in the next session to address these issues and whether this move will open the door to more liberalization of the laws here or if it will have the unintended consequence of setting the cause back.
Yeah, I’ve had a medical cannabis client in MN, and things are soooooo regulated on the medical side of things, most in the nation, at least at first.
Repeal should be difficult to achieve unless Walz loses, a real possibility but I would guess he’ll pull through. If it is repealed, I think people will be pretty pissed. The politics have been moving in favor of legalization very rapidly.
Minnesota legislators have NEVER understood what they were doing when it comes to cannabis. They first tackled it in 1935. ” . . .a growing menace . . . marijuana smoking, a dangerous drug which reacts upon the human system similarly to opium . . a widespread practice in the public schools . . . having an alarming effect on young boys and girls . . . the marijuana weed is found in Mexico, and there is some in Minnesota.”
There was, indeed. Commercial hemp was being raised that year out in Traverse or Big Stone County. And when the Navy needed hemp during W.W. II, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics issued “Producer of Marijuana” certificates to hundreds of MN farmers who raised 30,000 acres of cannabis across central and southern parts of the state.
MN lawmakers have never been able to grasp that cannabis is a plant, not a crime. Now, when public opinion powerfully favors re-legalization, when 19 states have enacted “21+” personal-use laws, when legalization plebiscites have carried states like SD, AZ, and MT, among others–our legislators continue to act as if it’s plutonium, not pot. They were so eager to bring Delta-8 molecules INSIDE the membrane of statutory prohibition that they failed to notice the Delta-9’s oozing osmotically out of it. I venture to say that not one in 201 of them could actually explain the distinction between Delta-8 and Delta-9, either in chemical structure or in supposed psychoactive effects. [I certainly couldn’t do so . . . and can’t see why the failed policy of prohibition should be extended instead of avoided.]
“Marijuana” or “Marihuana” (as Anslinger preferred) was never anything other than a legal fiction. Our lawmakers now stumble around, seeking cues from the Pharmacy Board’s Cody Wiberg on the prohibitionist side and getting deceptively mixed signals from slick lobbyists pitching for the lucrative niche players scrambling for profitable advantage from the unsettled, incremental erosion of the prohibition statutes. There’s the CBD profiteers, the Delta-8 opportunists (losers in this year’s musical-chairs folly), the coastal corporations feeling for future advantage, the medical-cannabis cartel trying to sustain its privilege, and the “hemp” hustlers who have been going broke trying to peddle their low-THC crop with its idiotically high regulatory overhead costs. NOW these dopes have their big chance—to start extracting THC from their non-psychoactive plants and using it to make a product to let folks get high. This is akin to making chicken soup by only using the beaks and claws of the birds. There are strains of hemp now which measure out at 20% or greater levels of THC. Why not make ingestible products from them rather than from ditch-weed?
I also want to point out that gummies or other edibles aren’t ideal vectors for cannabis consumption for most people. In contrast to smoking or vaping, with the edibles it’s a lot harder to titrate to the dose that makes the user comfortable and a lot more likely that a person would get that “too high” sense of distress.
All of these cannabis regulations and licensing requirements are still violations of Article XIII, Section 7 of the Minnesota Constitution. Chew on that.
Amen. Cops, cop-courting politicians, and regulators are like Wile E. Coyote. They can’t fathom not continuing to chase because, well, that’s what they have always done!
This latest chapter is Minnesota at it’s absolute looniest. Just legalize it.
Don’t forget the groups that lobbied extensively in bad faith to make/keep it illegal:
Big Plastic (DuPont’s new invention of nylon didn’t want to compete with hemp)
Big Paper (Hearst was the original Murdoch, and hemp competed with trees, for a double-whammy interest in making reefer illegal)
Big Alcohol (after prohibition was repealed, beer and liquor were made by a few giants compared to the enormous number of small brewers and distillers that existed before prohibition).
Great points. Law enforcement officers too.