Ohio GOP Leaders Claim Bill To Roll Back Marijuana Legalization Law Doesn’t Disrespect Voters

Ohio’s Senate president is pushing back against criticism of a bill that would scale back parts of a voter-approved marijuana legalization law, claiming that the legislation does not disrespect the will of the electorate and would have little impact on products available in stores.

“My definitive message is: If you want to go purchase marijuana products from a licensed dispensary, that is going to be unchanged by Senate Bill 56,” Senate President Rob McColley (R) said on a podcast posted on Friday. “The only difference you’ll notice is the packaging may not look as appealing to children, but you’ll still be able to buy the same products.”

McColley was speaking on a The President’s Podcast, produced and published by Ohio Senate Republicans. He and host John Fortney, the communications director for the Senate GOP caucus, spent the first half of the podcast defending SB 56, which would amend the cannabis law passed by voters in November 2023.

Among other changes, the bill would halve the number of plants that adults could grow, add new criminal penalties around cannabis conduct and remove select social equity provisions in the law.

The Senate approved the proposal on a 23–9 vote last week.

Critics, such as Sen. Bill DeMora (D), who spoke against the measures on the Senate floor, contend that the plan “goes against the will of the voters and will kill the adult industry in Ohio.”

Fortney began the podcast by acknowledging “a lot of controversy around Senate Bill 56,” asserting that “all it did was preserve access to what the voters approved in November of 2023, the initiated marijuana statute, and put some safety and security parameters around it for—of all things, Mr. President—children.”

“The far left, the Democrat narrative, the narrative of the legacy media, has been, ‘Republicans are trying to take away what the voters approved,’ which is patently false,” Fortney continued. “What a lie.”

“Absolutely,” McColley replied, warning that newspaper readers and TV news viewers “are going to hear an awful lot of hyperbole” and falsehoods about the proposal.

Fortney, in a separate blog post about the podcast, said the proposal “created a media tantrum the size of a tidal wave, all to protect pot.”

“Coverage this week from Ohio’s legacy media which hasn’t learned anything from the November election seems to think it is wise to leave children and families unprotected from secondhand smoke,” he wrote.

While McColley said initially on the podcast that the “only” difference in products available under SB 56 would be packaging, he later noted that the bill would also lower THC potency in marijuana flower and concentrates and cap per-package THC amounts in edible products.

In its current form, it would also prevent people with felony convictions from obtaining a marijuana license and restore the ability of level two cultivators to expand their operations to 15,000 square feet.

The legislation, from Sen. Steve Huffman (R), would also roll back the voter-approved homegrow provision, reducing the number of plants that could be grown at a residence from 12 down to six.

“That’s still a gigantic amount of produce or product or buds that you would have available,” Fortney said on the podcast.

Replied McColley: “Many of these marijuana plants can grow enough marijuana for up to 300 joints in a year through their harvest cycles. So you do the math—and this is supposed to be for personal use—but yeah, even just 12 plants, that’s 3,600 joints a year.”

Under current law, criminal penalties for home cultivation don’t kick in until a household grows 24 plants, the Senate president noted, adding, “That’s 7,200 joints a year.”

“I smoke a lot of cigars, I assured you,” Fortney responded, “but I don’t smoke 7,000 cigars.”

“It stands to reason that if you are growing that much marijuana, you are likely transferring it to somebody else for profit or otherwise, which is illegal,” McColley argued. “Lowering it to a six-plant-per-household threshold is still plenty of marijuana for people to consumer for their own personal use.”

Reform advocates oppose the legislation. In addition to it limiting permissible activity, they argue that it would recriminalize the sharing of cannabis between adults, smoking or vaping in someone’s own back yard and transporting unopened edibles in a vehicle.

On the podcast, McColley emphasized the bill’s effort to limit smoking marijuana in public.

“If you want to go to a park and you want to consume a joint, for example, around children, that’s going to be prohibited,” he said. “I think most people would agree [that] if if you’re taking your children to a ball game, or you’re going to dinner with your your elderly parents, you don’t really want to walk through a cloud of smoke.”

He also downplayed the risk of criminal charges from public consumption.

“The likelihood of anybody really running into some serious penalties for this are actually slim to none,” he said, “because a minor misdemeanor, you can’t be jailed for it, there’s simply a fine.”

“What’s more likely to happen is that, if you see people consuming those products— again, only smoking in public—what you would likely see is somebody simply go up to them and say, ‘You can’t do that here; you got to do it somewhere else.’”

SB 56 would eliminate non-discrimination protections to ensure cannabis consumers aren’t denied child custody, access to medical care and public benefits.

DeMora said on the Senate floor that “a top priority of any legislation dealing with marijuana should be to preserve the will of the people,” adding that “the people made their will known” when they approved Issue 2.

“They wanted higher THC limits. They wanted the ability to grow 12 plants at their home. They wanted level three craft growers. They wanted common sense public smoking restrictions. And they wanted taxes to help the municipalities addiction and substance abuse efforts and those that were affected by criminalization,” the Democratic senator said. “This bill does none of those things. In fact, it makes all those provisions worse.”

Sen. Louis Blessing (R) voiced support for the proposal, but said he felt the fact that the legislature was having this debate about revising the law demonstrates why lawmakers should’ve seen the writing on the wall and moved to enact legalization themselves, before it became a ballot issue.

In its initial form, the bill would have raised the state’s excise tax on marijuana products from 10 percent to 15 percent and also changed how taxes are redistributed to local governments. But those tax provisions were removed at the previous hearing in light of separate plans to adjust the tax rate in broader budget legislation.

While the increased excise tax rate was removed from the latest version of SB 56, Gov. Mike DeWine (R) has separately indicated plans to double the double the current tax rate via the budget process, raising it to 20 percent.

The bill as passed by the Senate also stipulates that the state Division of Cannabis Control (DCC) would no longer be required to establish rules allowing for marijuana deliveries and online purchases.

At one point in the podcast, Fortney asked McColley about why lawmakers wouldn’t simply let regulators at the state’s existing Department of Cannabis Control write regulations around the adult-use market.

The Senate president said that’d be “an abdication” of the legislature’s duty and authority.

“The regulators, albeit well intentioned in many cases, were not elected by the people to write law,” he said. “They’re employees of the state. Nobody elected them to be there.

“If we advocate that authority to the executive branch, not only we are we advocating our own legislative authority, but we’re also failing to do the jobs that the people elected us to come down here to do.”

In general, however, he said he feels state regulators are “doing a good job.”

“There’s a lot that’s been thrown at them in a short amount of time, but I think by and large, they’re doing as best job that we could expect of them,” McColley said.

Certain Democrats have so far indicated a willingness to finesse the cannabis law, but they’ve said Huffman’s proposed changes to provisions around issues such as home cultivation are a bridge too far.

Sen. Casey Weinstein (D), for example, has said there’s “definitely bipartisan support for protections in marketing to keep kids safe and sensible limitations on where you can use cannabis,” but not for undermining fundamental components of what voters approved.

Ahead of last week’s Senate floor hearing, the ACLU of Ohio put out a call to action, urging people to contact their representatives and express opposition to the proposed changes to that existing law.

The bill’s advancement comes as Ohio’s GOP House speaker seems to have changed his tune on the state’s marijuana law somewhat, walking back his previously stated plan to undermine provisions of the voter-approved initiative such as home cultivation rights.

Conflicts between Senate and House Republican leadership near the end of the last session played a key role in stalling amendment proposals. It’s unclear if the chambers will be able to reach consensus this round, especially as the market continues to evolve and consumers adopt to the law.

House Speaker Matt Huffman (R), who is the cousin of SB 56’s sponsor and previously served as Senate president, said that while he continues to oppose the reform measure voters passed, he doesn’t believe anyone in the legislature “realistically is suggesting that we’re going to repeal the legalization of marijuana.”

“I’m not for it. I wasn’t for the casinos coming to Ohio, either. But there’s lots of stuff that’s part of the Constitution and the law that are there that I don’t like,” he said.

To that end, the speaker indicated he’s no longer interested in pursuing plans to broadly undermine the cannabis law, despite having backed legislation as a Senate leader last session that would have decreased allowable THC levels in state-legal cannabis products, reduced the number of plants that adults could grow at home and increased costs for consumers at dispensaries.

Initially, changes backed by Matt Huffman last year would have eliminated home cultivation rights entirely for Ohio adults and criminalized all cannabis obtained anywhere other than a state-licensed retailer.

While some Democratic lawmakers have previously indicated that they may be amenable to certain revisions, such as putting certain cannabis tax revenue toward K-12 education, other supporters of the voter-passed legalization initiative are firmly against letting legislators undermine the will of the majority that approved it.

Meanwhile, as 2024 came to a close with the new marijuana legalization law in effect, Ohio officials announced the state saw adult-use cannabis sales exceed $242 million.

As the 2025 session gets underway, lawmakers are also expected to consider key changes to the state’s hemp laws. In November, legislators took testimony on a proposal that would ban intoxicating hemp products in the state. Steve Huffman, the sponsor of the marijuana revision bill, introduced that proposal after the governor called on lawmakers to regulate or ban delta-8 THC products.

Separately, despite legalization of adult-use cannabis in Ohio, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’s (VA) Cincinnati health center issued a reminder last summer that government doctors are still prohibited from recommending medical cannabis to veterans—at least as long as it remains a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law.

Medical Marijuana Is A ‘Safe And Effective Treatment’ For Pain And Sleep Issues In Older People, Study Shows