SQ811: Highly-Taxed Marijuana Without A Patient Card

3/5/2020

We have a 4th version of marijuana legalization filed at the Secretary of state's office in less than 3 months. This one is also a constitutional amendment. The legislature, agencies, and courts, would not be able to change the language. Only a federal mandate could supersede the enactment.

The recent Tennessee Winery case which went to the Federal Supreme Court is already contradicting multiple mandates in SQ811. Interstate Commerce rights in the US Constitution do not allow a state to ban people from commerce during a waiting period of years after establishing residency. While this flaw does not kill the whole amendment, it demonstrates that the effort lacked proper research and broad input.
Here's what else we saw:

This attempt would put a 25% tax on all cannabis products, unless a resident has a patient card or is a patient in a reciprocating other state.
Patient cards would drop from $100, to $20.
City ordinances would be largely nullified by the enactment of this state question.
Cities & counties would see their cut of the excise tax drop to about 1% of the gross sales of cannabis product.

We scanned all 40-some pages that the Secretary of State posted, but is was a poor quality image PDF. So we did our best to recreate a text file and make it available. It's posted below. Yes, it has several grammatical errors and misspells. In just a couple hours I saw enough flaws to be embarrassed by this representation of writing constitutional law.

Leading Oklahoma Cannabis Industry attorney, Ronald Durbin, posted a cursory video review of the filed document and gave both a scathing and complimentary reaction to the document.
His statements seem to say that this could be pulled and refiled into an excellent statutory initiative petition.
We embedded his video in the column to the right.

The embedded frame to the right consists of the document filed at the Secretary of state's office.
You can scroll through the document and follow the comments of Attorney Ron Durbin, while he details the flaws and fixes that SQ811 contains.

Comments

Nigel O'Mally

Nigel heavily focuses on the medical research and drug policy topics at SoonerPolitics, from an international perspective & a background in homeopathic herbs and agrarian culture.

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