Top Wisconsin Lawmaker Announces Plan To Legalize Medical Marijuana In 2025

The minority leader of Wisconsin’s Senate said this week that she plans to introduce a medical marijuana legalization bill in the coming legislative session, building on past legalization efforts that have fallen short in the face of pushback from Republican lawmakers.

Sen. Dianne Hesselbein (D) told local reporters she believes the medical-only measure will have a realistic chance at passage in the coming year given recent Democratic pickups in the Senate that ended the GOP’s supermajority control of the chamber.

“With 18 Republicans and 15 Democrats, I think they’re going to need our votes to get anything done in the state Senate,” she told Wisconsin Public Radio.

Hesselbein said she intends to reintroduce a 2022 bill that would have tasked the state’s Department of Health Services with overseeing a medical marijuana program. That’s a more modest proposal than Democrats’ most recent proposal to legalize both medical and recreational use.

Some elected Republicans did support limited medical marijuana legalization this past session, but leaders said there wasn’t enough time to hammer out differences between Senate and Assembly lawmakers.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) said in February that the GOP-controlled Senate “wants to have a more liberal version than the one that we’re willing to pass,” which “probably doesn’t leave us enough time with the waning days of the session” to advance that bill.

Hesselbein said the new bill will begin with language from the 2022 proposal, SB 1035, though she’s open to negotiating details of the plan.

“I’ll put it out there, but I’m open to amendments. I’m open to changes,” she told WPR.

The lawmaker added that while adult-use legalization isn’t likely to become law anytime soon, “we’ve got to get the conversation started once again” around medical use.

“Let’s get medicinal out there, because there are a lot of people that could benefit from that,” Hesselbein said.

The announcement from Hesselbein comes on the heels of support for marijuana legalization as a 2025 prioriry from Gov. Tony Evers (D) as well as results of a new survey showing strong support for cannabis legalization among rural voters.

Evers’s comments—in which he said he’d like to see “legalizing marijuana” put second on a list of items to be implemented in the new year—came earlier this month as part of a listening tour related to the state budget.  Other proposed reforms included expanding healthcare, promoting gun safety and more.

In May, Evers had said he was “hopeful” that the November election would give Democrats control of the legislature, in part because he argued it would position the state to finally legalize cannabis.

“We’ve been working hard over the last five years, several budgets, to make that happen,” he said at the time. “I know we’re surrounded by states with recreational marijuana, and we’re going to continue to do it.”

Separately, a survey of rural voters in Wisconsin that was released last week revealed that nearly 2 in 3 (65 percent) support legalizing marijuana broadly. The poll, from the conservative nonprofit Institute for Reforming Government and the State Policy Network, asked 541 voters from rural counties in Wisconsin about a range of policy issues. Separately, pollsters also conducted an online qualitative study, asking 15 voters of various political affiliations about their policy views.

While the report emphasizes that cannabis legalization is no longer a partisan issue in rural Wisconsin, its results still show a striking difference of opinion between self-identified Republicans and Democrats.

Among Democrats, more than 8 in 10 (82 percent) said they supported legalizing the substance. Of GOP voters, meanwhile, less than half (46 percent) favored the reform.

Comments from the qualitative online survey shed further light on how some voters view the issue.

“It’s a natural herb. Let it be used. Keeping it illegal makes it cost more,” said a conservative Republican participant identified only as Petra S.

Michelle S., a moderate Democrat, said she thinks “it’s safer than alcohol which is legal,” adding: “It seems silly not to legalize it when we have a state bordering us where it is legal and a taxpaying industry.”

Notably, the survey asked some voters whether they support legalizing “marijuana” and others whether they supported legalizing “cannabis.” While the difference in responses was fairly slim (6 percent), people were more likely to say they supported cannabis legalization.

Following the failure of the most recent GOP-led medical marijuana bill, some elected Democrats criticized Republican lawmakers for blocking cannabis reform. Sen. Melissa Agard (D), for example, described the proposal in an op-ed for Marijuana Moment as a “sham medical marijuana bill” that “was always smoke and mirrors.”

The state Department of Revenue released a fiscal estimate of the economic impact of a legalization bill from Agard last year, projecting that the reform would generate nearly $170 million annually in tax revenue.

Republicans have also consistently stripped marijuana proposals from the governor’s budget requests.

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A Wisconsin Democratic Assemblymember tried to force a vote on a medical cannabis compromise proposal in February, as an amendment to an unrelated kratom bill, but he told Marijuana Moment he suspects leadership intentionally pulled that legislation from the agenda at the last minute to avoid a showdown on the issue.

That move came as the GOP speaker retreated on his own limited cannabis legislation that a top Republican senator criticized as anti-free market because it would’ve created a system of state-run dispensaries.

A legislative analysis requested by lawmakers estimated that Wisconsin residents spent more than $121 million on cannabis in Illinois alone in 2022, contributing $36 million in tax revenue to the neighboring state.

Evers and other Democrats have since at least January insisted that they would be willing to enact a modest medical marijuana program, even if they’d prefer more comprehensive reform.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of Wisconsin lawmakers formally introduced a measure to decriminalize marijuana possession in December 2023. Sponsors had hoped the limited, noncommercial reform would win enough support to clear the state’s GOP-controlled legislature and become law in parallel with the separate medical cannabis bill.

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Photo courtesy of Chris Wallis // Side Pocket Images.