The Ohio Senate has resurrected a proposal that overhauls the state’s relatively young recreational marijuana program, in part by raising the excise tax on all product sales from 10% to 15%.
Introduced Tuesday by Sen. Steve Huffman (R-Tipp City), Senate Bill 56 closely mirrors a 2023 bill that cleared the chamber, merging the state’s medical and adult-use programs.
SB 56 strictly prohibits smoking cannabis in public, limiting Ohioans to partaking in private residences, and reduces home grow from 12 plants or less to six plants or less. It also limits how concentrated dispensaries’ THC products can be—maxing out at 35% for plant products and 70% for concentrates and extracts.
“It’s like concentrated orange juice,” Huffman said Wednesday. “You don’t drink concentrated orange juice. You’re going to dilute it down so that it's a reasonable amount.”
All related tax revenue would redirect to the state’s General Revenue Fund (GRF), unlike current law, which has pools of funds that go toward different purposes, like to local municipalities with dispensaries or to a social equity and jobs program that the bill also abolishes.
Senate President Rob McColley (R-Napoleon) said the tax hike and revenue redirection comes from a need to fund addiction services and law enforcement.
“There’s an awful lot of societal costs that are going to have to be borne by the legalization of marijuana,” McColley said Wednesday.
Regulations of delta-8 THC and other similar derivatives are not among SB 56’s provisions. Huffman plans to put those long-debated changes in a standalone bill, which he said he will introduce sometime next week.
Also absent from it are expungement provisions that Senate Democrats pushed for in 2023. Sen. Bill DeMora (D-Columbus) said he believes SB 56 generally flies in the face of voters, who ratified the recreational program’s details via the ballot box that same year.
“There’s no way that I’m going to let all this money go to GRF funds when voters clearly didn’t want that,” DeMora said. “Our bill (in 2023) had money going to the 9-8-8 Suicide Hotline and other things that money was being allotted to that we agreed on. But it was not all GRF funds and that’s ridiculous.”
Among other items:
- It streamlines the licensing process;
- Eliminates Level III cultivator licenses;
- Puts a ceiling on how many dispensaries can be licensed statewide, set at 350;
- Clarifies that drug-free workplaces are not violating Ohio Civil Rights Law protections by firing someone for cannabis use;
- And creates packaging and advertising regulations, such as barring edibles from being like a “realistic or fictional human, animal or fruit”
The Senate GOP is looking to move the bill fast. It could be on the floor by February, McColley said Wednesday.
