Can Granite Staters Trust the State’s Marijuana Study Commission?

In July of last year, I joined with other reform advocates in asking Gov. Chris Sununu to veto HB 215, a bill creating a study commission to contemplate the legalization, regulation, and taxation of marijuana. “New Hampshire should absolutely study marijuana legalization, but this isn’t the way to go about it,” I said at the time.

The problem was that the Senate had rewritten the bill after it passed the House to exclude supporters of marijuana policy reform from having a seat at the table, while maintaining the seats of prohibitionist members such as New Futures. Most legislators probably aren’t aware of this, but New Futures is a state affiliate of Project SAM — a national organization that opposes state medical cannabis bills everywhere they are considered and has even lobbied to maintain marijuana’s Schedule I status.

Our letter to Gov. Sununu noted this lack of balance and predicted that the commission would likely fail to earn the public’s confidence:

“If HB 215 is signed into law, the resulting commission’s credibility will be in question from the outset. If the House Speaker (who would appoint four House members) and the Senate President (who would appoint two senators) do not select open-minded legislators for the commission, advocates will have no choice but to criticize the make-up of the commission.”

Unfortunately, Gov. Sununu ignored these objections and signed the bill anyway, and, as we predicted, the commission ended up being overwhelmingly stacked with opponents of reform. The Speaker of the House at the time was die-hard prohibitionist Rep. Shawn Jasper, so it came as little surprise when three of the four House appointees turned out to have a record of usually voting against even modest, incremental reforms to the state’s marijuana policies.

Most notably, the person elected to chair the commission, Rep. Patrick Abrami (R-Stratham), voted against four out of six House-approved decriminalization bills between 2012 and 2017 and was one of only 64 representatives who voted against the state’s limited medical cannabis bill that became law in 2013.

At the commission’s first meeting in October, Rep. Abrami urged his fellow commission members to “leave our biases at home and objectively address this issue.” At the time, I praised him for taking this approach.

Unfortunately, it has since become clear that Rep. Abrami, who is also vice-chair of the Ways and Means Committee, has not in fact left his biases at home. In his zeal to defeat HB 656, a simple bill that would eliminate penalties for adults’ possession and cultivation of small amounts of marijuana, he has spread misinformation about the bill in conversations with other legislators, and he has misrepresented relevant testimony that was presented to the study commission. A transcript of remarks from the committee’s work session, along with responses, is available here.

For example, Rep. Abrami told committee members that “one of the biggest problems they’ve had (in legalized states) is with the home grown stuff, because six plants is a lot of plants. People grow more than they need, and what happens is it winds up getting sold... It creates a black market.”

This simply is not an accurate representation of the testimony that has been presented to the study commission. While some experts did testify that excess home cultivation was problematic, they were not talking about limited home grow policies such as the one proposed in HB 656 — they were talking about large-scale cultivation.

For example, until last summer, Colorado’s medical marijuana law allowed patients to grow up to 99 plants with the certification of a doctor. Additionally, allowing limited home cultivation obviously wouldn’t create a black market — the illicit market has existed for as long as anybody can remember. Instead, HB 656 would provide New Hampshire residents with a legal alternative to buying marijuana from dealers of illicit substances.

The House has already rejected Rep. Abrami’s arguments once, when it passed HB 656 in a 207-139 vote on January 9, and it should do so again on Thursday when representatives cast their final vote to determine if the bill will advance to the Senate.

Regardless of what happens with HB 656, in light of the overwhelming public support that exists for reforming our state’s antiquated cannabis laws, I think it’s clear that the people of New Hampshire deserve a study commission chairman who is fair and unbiased, if not outright supportive of reform.

To that end, advocates are now petitioning House Speaker Gene Chandler to replace Rep. Abrami with an unbiased representative who might inspire more confidence from the general public.

The commission’s work will, and should, continue. Reform advocates can only hope that it will be under the direction of an unbiased chairman.