Watching grass grow in Conn.
I am not a cynic. I do not have contempt for people’s motives.
But those of us with enough training and experience watching the foibles and follies of the General Assembly can reach realistic, if jaundiced, perspectives.
“Sure we’ll approve your highway toll plan (nod, nod, wink, wink) ...” More than one legislative leader said that to Gov. Ned Lamont last year.
You want nimble? You want innovation? Heck, you want mainstream? Don’t depend on the Connecticut General Assembly, where innovative ideas get thrust into desk drawers to grow mold and fester faster.
In the antebellum years up to the American Civil War, Connecticut was called “the Georgia of the North,” for its racist tendencies.
More recently, 100 years ago to be exact, the General Assembly’s decision to give women the right to vote was about a month after Tennessee became the important 36th state needed to make it the law of the land.
I have always disliked that “Land of Steady Habits” moniker, which gets bandied about as if it were a good thing. “Land of Plodding, Smug, ’Fraidy Cats” is more like it.
Something about the 151 members of the House of Representatives and the 36 suspects in the Senate circle create obstacles to actual progress. Want to expand affordable housing opportunities in a state where suburban and rural districts dominate the legislature? You are making me laugh.
So, I’m sitting in the din of the adult equivalent of a middle school lunch room: the cafeteria of the Legislative Office Building. There are about 100 people lolling at various tables as the lunch hour enters its final half.
There are lobbyists, staffers, staffers with lobbyists, lawmakers with staffers and lobbyists, leavened with casually dressed, slightly perplexed tourists.
Across the table is Steven Hawkins, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Institute. He’s an optimist, buoyed by last year’s vote in the Illinois legislature, the first lawmaking state body in the nation to approve adult-use cannabis at a time when, in the 10 other states with full legalization, citizen referendums pushed state governments into action.
There is no such avenue for direct referendum in Connecticut, short of a very clunky constitutional amendment process, which if legislation were approved this year and by the next General Assembly next year, could finally put the issue before statewide voters in 2022.
After I watched the annual collapse of the issue in recent years, culminating in last year’s abandonment of an all-dressed-up-andready-to-go clutch of legalization bills, Hawkins’ mellow, seen-everything attitude seems to be a luxury.
But he and other advocates are in it for the long haul.
I mention to Hawkins how people I know have no problem simply driving to Northampton or Great Barrington for lab-tested, legal cannabis.
They don’t expect much from their state lawmakers and have no problem giving their entertainment dollars, and taxes, to the Massachusetts free state. Officials there say half their cannabis customers are from out-of-state.
“I think we do not have to reinvent the wheel,” Hawkins says. “We can look at a state like Illinois that grappled with all the issues that are on the table in Connecticut: equity provisions, revenue provisions, the whole bailiwick. They worked it out in a legislative body.”
The three main pieces of the Illinois bill include the erasure of criminal records for 11,000 people with lowlevel marijuana arrests; giving inner-city residents whose neighborhoods were targeted by the racist war on drugs a chance to get involved in the new cannabis-related industries; and the investment of 25 percent of revenues back into those communities including re-entry programs, educational opportunities and occupational training.
Illinois is the fifth-largest state in the nation.
“Illinois may not be the model, but it’s a model, and as more states look to move forward, Illinois presents a legislative body that had a very good deliberative process, worked very closely with the governor’s office and achieved that result,” Stevens says.
Putting aside Lamont’s recent pronouncements that he wants to work on legalized cannabis as a regional initiative, Stevens notes that full legalization will be on the November ballot in New Jersey. In New York, Andrew Cuomo, Lamont’s fishing buddy, is making it a legislative priority this year. Connecticut has a General Assembly election this year, meaning the bill has a minuscule chance of passage.
“Connecticut has an opportunity to be first out of the block in the region if it so chooses,” Hawkins says. “Connecticut residents are going to spend the money on cannabis. The only question is whether it will be spent here in this state or will it be going to Massachusetts and New York.”
A possible historic silver lining: In 1919, as state after state fell to the poorly conceived, crime-fostering amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning alcoholic beverages, Connecticut and Rhode Island rejected it.