A GOP senator says he’s hopeful that Congress will have a “discussion” about potentially creating a federal regulatory framework for marijuana in 2025, though he added that he personally wouldn’t vote to federally legalize cannabis.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing focused on sports betting on Tuesday, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) drew a parallel between state-level gambling and marijuana laws, arguing that the federal government has a responsibility to provide some level of regulatory oversight for both industries that are being legalized in a growing number of jurisdictions across the country.
But that doesn’t mean he’d support legislation to make either sports better or cannabis federally legal, the senator said.
“I would never vote, as a matter of federal legislation, to legalize gambling at the federal level—in the same way that I wouldn’t for marijuana,” Tillis said. However, he said states that have legalized either activity are effectively facilitating interstate commerce that warrants federal oversight.
“If you’re in a state that’s not legalized, then you’re naive if you don’t think they’re gambling—in the same way that if you’re in a state that doesn’t have pot legal, then you’re going to the Eastern Band of the Cherokee and buying pot that, for some reason, you can buy in western North Carolina,” he said.
The senator is referencing the fact that, while cannabis remains illegal in his state of North Carolina, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians within the state’s borders recently exercised its autonomy to legalize cannabis sales in the tribe’s jurisdiction.
“There’s not a legal place you can transport it out of the Eastern Band of the Cherokees boundary, for example. So maybe we need to start thinking about rules of the road,” Tillis said. “I’m kind of going on the pot angle, but on the gambling angle we need to get this right, or it’s going to get worse, and the bad actors are going to exploit more.”
Watch the senator’s remarks on cannabis and gambling policy, starting at 1:05:10 into the video below:
The senator said there’s a “pretty substantial correlation between states who have legalized marijuana and states who are legalizing sports betting,” and the “challenge that we have is we have a patchwork of laws now around the marijuana trade, and we have a patchwork of laws around the sports betting trade.”
“So it really raises the question of, how can we get to a place where, when a market exists and it has persisted for thousands and thousands of years—a gambling market—how do we make it safe?” Tillis said. “How do we address the negative consequences which will invariably occur? And how do we resource the various agencies to make sure that we can do that?”
While the senator’s point was about negating potential harms from gambling, he’s made several comments over recent months about his similar feelings as it applies to marijuana laws.
Last month, for example, he said marijuana rescheduling and industry banking legislation are “half-assed measures,” and lawmakers should instead focus on creating a federal regulatory framework for cannabis similar to alcohol and tobacco.
“We probably need to look at a federal comprehensive framework to deal with the banking issues and scheduling issues,” Tillis said at the time. “But I think, in my opinion, we need a federal regimen that’s not unlike what we have for tobacco and alcohol, where you authenticate the crops on the front end, you mandate flavorings and delivery methods through the FDA and you allow banking.”
Without creating “one consistent framework” for marijuana, “we’re dancing around the issue,” he said.
Don Murphy, a cannabis lobbyist and former GOP Maryland legislator who attended Tuesday’s committee hearing and briefly spoke with the senator, said it was “encouraging to hear Senator Tillis telegraph a comprehensive hearing on cannabis especially considering his comment about the SAFE Banking Act being a ‘half-assed’ measure.”
“His statement also suggests cannabis policy is on the GOP’s radar, even among those members who have been less than supportive in the past,” Murphy said.
Tillis previously discussed his support for creating a federal regulatory scheme for marijuana in an interview with Green Market Report in July, affirming that there should be a framework that “treats marijuana just like tobacco.”
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Despite his position, in April Tillis joined Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) in asking federal, state and local officials what steps they were taking to enforce marijuana prohibition as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians prepared to launch recreational cannabis sales on its lands within North Carolina.
Meanwhile, back in 2017, Tillis also teamed up with bipartisan colleagues on a bill that was meant to ease researchers’ access to marijuana for studies on its medical benefits and require the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to develop recommendations for good manufacturing practices for growing and producing cannabis for research.
Photo courtesy of Chris Wallis // Side Pocket Images.
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