Last year Vermont the possession and personal use of small amounts of marijuana. Now Vermont lawmakers are drafting rules for a legal and regulated system to buy, sell and grow cannabis. We're looking at what's being proposed for commercial cannabis in Vermont.
Bennington Sen. Dick Sears, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and primary , says the bill outlines plans for a 鈥渃annabis control board鈥� to set rules and license cannabis cultivation, testing, and retail sales across Vermont.
As the bill stands now, legal sales of cannabis wouldn't happen until April 2021.
Sears says the bill aspires to prioritize applicants who foster social justice, including those with nonviolent drug offenses on their records.
"Just don鈥檛 automatically disqualify somebody because they have a record," Sears says. "That鈥檚 what we鈥檙e saying. Folks that were left behind by the war on cannabis and other drugs need to be accounted for in this bill."
The Senate bill would include a 10 percent tax on all cannabis sales. An additional one percent tax could be levied by towns and cities. All cannabis sales would be exempt from Vermont's 6 percent sales tax.
A similar proposal in the House, , proposes higher state and local taxes on cannabis. It would also allow medical cannabis dispensaries to start selling to the general public as early as January 2020.
Listen to the full interview with Sen. Sears above to hear more about the commercial cannabis bill, and from a professor of pharmacology at the UVM Larner College of Medicine and co-director for the medical cannabis course, who discusses the public health of marijuana legalization in states like Colorado.
Broadcast live on Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2019 at noon; rebroadcast at 7 p.m.
