As a freshman legislator in 2014, Rep. Melissa Sargent (D-Madison) introduced a bill to fully legalize marijuana in Wisconsin. At the time, she found that a lot of residents supported the idea, even if they couldn’t bring themselves to say it out loud. “People would come up to me and quietly say, ‘I’m a fan of the stuff you’re working on’ or ‘Keep up the good work with that one policy,’” Sargent recalls. “It was almost like a wink and a nod. Code words were used.”
Just a few years later, Rep. Sargent has seen a “seismic shift” in public perception. People are much more comfortable talking openly about cannabis, and national polls show a majority of Americans are in favor of its legalization. A 2016 Marquette Law School poll found that 59% of Wisconsinites believe it should be legal and regulated like alcohol.
Eric Marsch, executive director of the Southeastern Wisconsin chapter of NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), agrees there is more momentum behind legalization today. Still, he cautions, momentum is not a guarantee. In Wisconsin, the Republican legislative majority continues to resist ideas for reform, and Gov. Scott Walker, a frequent promoter of the “gateway drug” theory, supports prohibition even for medical use. If Wisconsinites don’t vote pro-cannabis candidates into office, Marsch says, legalization is unlikely to happen anytime soon. “When we talk to people now, they say, ‘It’s coming soon, we’re going to get there,’” Marsch says. “But we’re only going to ‘get there’ if people push for it. It’s not just going to happen on its own.”
Lifting the Stigma
In 1970, Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act which classified marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug with high potential for abuse and no medical benefits. Two years later, the Richard Nixon-appointed Shafer Commission released a report stating that marijuana was, in fact, harmless and recommending alternatives to prohibition. The recommendations were ignored, and the classification remained—as did the negative stereotypes that accompanied it. Against that backdrop, legalization efforts were easy to dismiss. “It’s been such a fringe issue that most people never took it seriously,” Marsch says. “They were told, ‘weed is bad, it makes you stupid and lazy.’ People didn’t have any reason to challenge those misconceptions.”
Advocates have long tried to overcome this stigma by promoting the medical benefits. Gary Storck, an activist and author of the blog cannabadger.com, was a teenager when he started treating his glaucoma with marijuana. He has now spent decades pushing for legal medical marijuana in Wisconsin by lobbying elected officials, attending demonstrations and writing hundreds of articles and letters to the editor to combat the “media demonization” that he says has kept cannabis on the fringe.
At hearings, Storck has joined fellow patients in testifying about how medical marijuana helps them treat a range of conditions. Although the pro-cannabis message has historically been “a hard sell,” he says, it’s often the medical benefits that turn people around. “Someone might say it’s a bad thing, and then if they or someone they love gets sick, they’ll see that it can help them,” he says. “Suddenly, they’ll think this is a very useful plant, and if patients can use this safely for debilitated health, why can’t anybody use it?”
As marijuana’s reputation pivots from gateway drug to multi-purpose medicine, support has gone up, and many elected officials have taken note. Legalization and regulation of marijuana is now part of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s platform, and many of the candidates for governor are openly pro-cannabis. Candidates like Democrats Matt Flynn and Mike McCabe and Libertarian Party candidate Phil Anderson have participated in Southeastern Wisconsin NORML’s events. For Storck, seeing candidates be upfront with their support signals a major change. “For years, we’d have to do things like call in to radio shows with loaded questions and try to get candidates’ comments about it. But they would never voluntarily comment,” he said. “This time around, they understand. They’ve seen the polling.”
Watching Other States
In 2012, Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes. Today, marijuana is legal in nine states (and Washington, D.C.) and decriminalized in 13. A total of 29 states now allow medical use of marijuana.
The impact of legalization and regulation can be felt, and measured, in a lot of ways. State agencies and media are closely tracking rates of criminal activity, arrests, impaired driving incidents and economic bumps. On its website, NORML has collected peer-reviewed reports linking regulation to benefits like job creation, tax revenue and reduced alcohol consumption. A pair of 2018 studies suggested it might even help curb the opioid epidemic.
Additionally, some of the biggest fears around legalization seem not to have materialized. Surveys in Colorado and Washington show no significant increase in teenage marijuana use and no rise in criminal activity. The rate of traffic fatalities also has not changed, although both states have seen an increase in traffic fatalities in which the deceased driver tested positive for marijuana. Sargent says that impaired driving is always a “major concern,” and that marijuana should be included in the bigger traffic safety conversation, alongside alcohol, texting and fatigue. As more states reform their laws, Sargent observes that it’s important to consider all of the results—both good and bad—rather than be swayed by any one study or data point. “You can always find a scientific paper out there that’s going to reinforce whatever you believe,” she says. “So it’s really important to study this from all dimensions.”
Marsch says the fact that legalization “didn’t make the sky fall” in other states has helped normalize the concept in Wisconsin. In 2018, the state did take the unexpected step of legalizing industrial hemp farming with a unanimous vote in the Wisconsin Senate. “That was huge,” Storck says. “I never expected that under Walker.”
Nevertheless, the Republican-controlled legislature continues to block broader reforms. In the 2017-’18 legislative session, lawmakers introduced a number of cannabis-related bills, proposing ideas like reduced fines for possession of less than 10 grams, legal medical use, and an advisory referendum on medical marijuana. All of them failed to pass.
Marijuana and the Criminal Justice System
In Wisconsin, first offense marijuana possession is punishable by fine or up to six months of incarceration. A subsequent offense is a Class I felony, which can carry a sentence of up to three-and-one-half years in prison. These laws have been criticized not only for their harshness but also because of how they are enforced. Research shows that black and white people use marijuana at roughly the same rate, but African Americans are three-and-a-half times more likely to be arrested for it, according to the Brookings Institute. In Wisconsin, records show the disparity is much more severe.
The Wisconsin Justice Initiative, analyzing Milwaukee County arrest records from 2015 and 2016, found that 86% of the people arrested for second-offense possession (with no other crime involved) were African American. In the city of Milwaukee, it found that 70% of marijuana possession cases filed were against African Americans, who make up only 40% of the city’s population. In Madison, a city widely thought of as pot friendly, black people account for about 7% of the population and more than half of marijuana arrests.
The disproportionate enforcement of drug offenses is a prominent cause of the glaring racial disparity in Wisconsin’s criminal justice system. Even in states like Colorado, where pot is legal and arrests have plummeted, the imbalance in enforcement persists. For this reason, advocates regard legalization not as solution to racial bias in the criminal justice system but as a step toward it. “Once we legalize marijuana, we will be able to address things like our egregious racial disparity,” Sargent says. “This is one way that we can have a direct impact.”
At the local level, some Wisconsin cities have decriminalized pot by reducing the penalty for possession. In 2015, Milwaukee voted to reduce the penalty for marijuana possession from $250 to $50. In 2017, Monona (in Dane County) voted to remove possession fines altogether.
Taxes and Jobs
Proponents also frame legalization as an economic solution, providing opportunities to save money and to make it. Wisconsin currently spends millions of dollars a year on the criminal enforcement of marijuana. A given marijuana arrest, for example, costs more than $400 in law enforcement resources. In 2016, the state arrested 16,000 people for possession alone. And, of course, with legalization comes tax revenue. Colorado reportedly made some $500 million in tax revenues from marijuana sales between 2014 and 2017. Sales in Washington generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year, much of which goes toward public health programs like Medicaid.
Under a bill Sargent introduced in 2017, medical dispensaries would pay annual fees to the state, and producers and sellers of recreational marijuana would be subject to a sales tax and excise tax. The Wisconsin Department of Revenue has predicted that the bill would generate $138 million in tax revenue by 2021. In addition to the potential windfall, Sargent says legalization and regulation would boost the economy in other ways, including job creation.
Even without legalizing marijuana, some lawmakers say, the state’s workforce could benefit from a more lenient approach to it. In 2018, Rep. David Bowen (D-Milwaukee) proposed legislation to bar employers from drug testing for THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol, one of at least 113 cannabinoids identified in cannabis and the principal psychoactive constituent of cannabis). Although it did not pass in this session, Bowen says the bill received “overwhelming support” across the state, and he plans to introduce it again. While he supports legalization, Bowen admits it’s unlikely to go very far under Wisconsin’s current political leadership.
This bill would address a specific problem without having to wait for that longstanding debate to change course. “Legalization is not what we’re proposing,” he says. “We’re talking about people having access to jobs and not being discriminated against because they consume THC.” With employers trying to fill positions, and many people looking for work, Bowen says, cannabis should not be a barrier to employment. “We need those folks to be working, to be able to provide for their families,” he says. “That should be the number one concern, not punishing people because they consume a harmless substance.”
A Popular Movement; a ‘Homegrown Solution’
Since 2014, Sargent has continued to introduce bills that would legalize marijuana. The legislation has evolved during that time as she has spoken to more people about it and incorporated their perspectives and concerns. “This is a homegrown solution,” she says. When legislation passes quickly, Sargent notes, it’s often because it happened behind closed doors, with little chance for public input. By contrast, marijuana reform in Wisconsin has been a long, slow process. But it’s also been out in the open and driven by the public.
In May, Southeastern Wisconsin NORML held its eighth annual March for Cannabis in Milwaukee, attended by several hundred people including activists, elected officials and several gubernatorial candidates. “I think it fires people up that we can have this conversation,” says Bowen, who spoke at the march. “Voters are hungry for a chance to further the conversation, rather than the Republican majority saying, ‘We’re not going to talk about it.’”
On the national scale, Marsch says that marijuana legalization “has only happened because of the people.” Apart from Vermont, he notes, all of the states that have fully legalized did so through a ballot initiative. Since Wisconsin does not allow ballot initiatives, change will have to come through the legislature. In May, the Milwaukee County Board voted in favor of a referendum for the Nov. 6 ballot, which will ask voters if they support legalizing cannabis for adults. Milwaukee County residents will then be able to weigh in on the legalization debate, and voters statewide will elect the governor and lawmakers who will shape it in the years ahead.
“These decisions on legalizing and decriminalizing have a vast impact on citizens all over the state, from our economy to our workforce to our future,” Bowen says. “And I look forward to a legislature and a governor that will really give this issue the time of day.”
