PRAIRIE VILLAGE — Inga Selders watched the Kansas Legislature repeatedly fumble bills opening the door to legal sales of medicinal or recreational cannabis.
The U.S. Congress has declined to bring unity to the hodgepodge of state laws guiding possession and consumption of cannabis.
As a member of the Prairie Village City Council, Selders wasn’t able to convince colleagues to decriminalize weed in that pocket of Johnson County.
The intransigence, amid leaps by Missouri and Colorado into recreational pot and Oklahoma to the medical option, led her to pull together this year a diverse, bipartisan organization — Cannabis Justice Coalition — designed to hold politicians accountable for refusing to get on the marijuana bandwagon.
The coalition’s agenda includes educating voters about the potential of pressuring state legislative candidates to create “fair and equitable” cannabis laws in Kansas, she said. It features advertising to elevate awareness of the issue and the endorsement of candidates in the November election, she said.
“It is time to be looking at pure recreational legalization of cannabis in the state of Kansas,” Selders said. “Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians — they want to see this fully legalized. It’s been held hostage with the political back-and-forth rhetoric.”
Barry Grissom, the U.S. attorney for Kansas during the administration of President Barack Obama and a member of the Cannabis Justice Coalition’s board, said during the Kansas Reflector podcast that Kansas voters must compel lawmakers to accept economic, health and financial benefits of legalization. If not, he said, lawmakers should acknowledge the liberty interest of adults to make personal decisions about cannabis use.
In terms of law enforcement, Grissom said, it was unacceptable Kansas continued to waste tax dollars by investigating, arresting, prosecuting and punishing people who engaged in an activity legal in 38 states, four U.S. territories and the District of Columbia.
“It’s bad public policy and it’s foolish,” he said. “If we’re really serious about controlling crime in different cities, let our officers focus their energies and their resources on going after the bad guys who break into homes, who physically assault us.”
During the interview, Grissom and Selders sat outside a Prairie Village restaurant a 5-minute drive from a Missouri dispensary. They’re clustered near the state line because Kansans are among the customers, he said.
Missouri voters approved recreational marijuana in 2022 by passing the citizen-initiated Amendment 3, which altered the state’s constitution to legalize use for adults 21 and older.
Kansas doesn’t have a mechanism allowing residents to similarly intervene in public policy debates by placing issues on statewide ballots. That meant decisions about cannabis were left to the Kansas Legislature and governor, but the closest Kansas has come was a 2021 narrow medical cannabis bill approved by the House and ignored by the Senate.
Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly endorsed medical marijuana legislation, but has argued the state wasn’t ready for a recreational cannabis law.
“I think she’s five years off the mark on that,” Selders said. “Just seeing the success of Missouri, seeing the success of Colorado, we know that we can absolutely do this in Kansas.”
Grissom said Kansas lawmakers didn’t have to make the bill-writing task difficult. They should study the dozens of statutes implemented in other states and cobble together a bill that made sense for the state, he said.
“You can take the best of what they’ve done and learned from any mistake they’ve had,” he said. “I look at treating it like alcohol, regulating it like alcohol.”
During the 2024 legislative session, lobbyists representing Wichita-area entrepreneurs failed to generate interest in a bill that would have created a five-year pilot program for sales of THC products for medicinal use only. The measure was criticized by some legalization advocates because it featured an unusually lengthy testing period and consolidated economic control of the industry in what looked like a monopoly. It didn’t get much traction at the Capitol.
In the meantime, Kansas legislative leadership authorized a joint House and Senate committee to meet for two days in October to study the possibility of developing marijuana legislation.
Selders said she was anxious the interim committee would resurrect the Wichita-centered medical cannabis bill introduced in the Kansas Senate rather than look a recreational cannabis options that diversified operational control of the new business opportunity.
The proposal from the U.S. Department of Justice to move cannabis with THC content over 0.3% from a Schedule I drug, viewed as not having a medical benefit, to the less-restrictive Schedule III could generate interest in a version of the flawed Senate Bill 555, she said.
“I am terrified that with the rescheduling of cannabis to Schedule III, that this bill could possibly come alive again,” Selders said. “I was disappointed that they didn’t just fully deschedule cannabis. One of our biggest aspects for the Cannabis Justice Coalition is the criminalization aspect of it, and rescheduling it to a Schedule III does nothing for our movement on that.”
This article originally appeared in the Kansas Reflector.
