→ This proposal offers a comprehensive framework for the cultivation, manufacture, sale, possession, and use of cannabis that prioritizes public health, public safety, and social justice. Prohibiting the possession and sale of cannabis has produced a thriving illicit market and staggering racial disparities in the dispensation of justice. Massachusetts, Maine, and Vermont already have some form of a market for adult-use recreational cannabis, and nearby states including New York, Rhode Island, and New Jersey are on track to legalize adult-use recreational cannabis in the near future. This Act, which was developed in careful partnership with those states, protects public health by providing access to safe products, preventing advertising and retail locations that would appeal to children, and proactively updating the state’s indoor clean air act to protect children and other individuals from secondhand smoke. It protects public safety by increasing the number of trained drug recognition experts in state and local police forces, updating traffic safety laws, reforming the administrative process that follows an impaired driving arrest, and freeing the state’s police, prosecutors, and other public safety officials to focus on more significant crimes. It promotes social justice by automatically erasing most cannabis possession convictions and empaneling an Equity Commission to develop proposals for how the individuals and communities that have borne the brunt of the War on Drugs can benefit from the creation of the legal cannabis market. Finally, it sets up a fair tax structure that will provide meaningful new state and municipal revenues.
→ Fact sheet
