Johnson County DA calls medical marijuana ‘trojan horse’ for full legalization in KS
For opponents to medical marijuana in Kansas, Missouri and other neighboring states are cautionary tales.
Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe looked to neighboring Missouri when urging members of the Kansas Senate not to move forward on legalization of marijuana for medical purposes.
“In Missouri there’s no restrictions, despite what the medical community says, for you getting the ability to have medical marijuana,” Howe told the Senate Federal and State Affairs Committee Wednesday.
In his written testimony, Howe said Missouri’s medical marijuana program was a “trojan horse” for full recreational legalization which voters approved last year.
Howe, a Republican, was one of five individuals invited to speak to the Senate committee Wednesday as leaders consider whether to move forward with a bill legalizing medicinal marijuana.
All five witnesses spoke in stark opposition to any legalization in an early sign that Kansas is unlikely to move on the issue anytime soon. The state is currently surrounded on three sides by states with some legal marijuana, including for recreational use in Missouri and Colorado and for medical use in Oklahoma.
Oklahoma voters will decide in a special election this month whether to enact full marijuana legalization.
“The fact that we’ve taken our time in the state of Kansas doesn’t make us wrong. The fact that other states have gone off the cliff doesn’t make them right,” Howe said.
Dispensaries in Missouri, which borders Howe’s county, began selling marijuana for recreational use last month.
Kansas has one of the strictest marijuana prohibitions in the nation. It is one of 13 states in the country that does not allow marijuana usage for medical or recreational purposes.
In 2021, the Kansas House passed a bill legalizing medical marijuana in limited circumstances, but the issue has had little traction in the Kansas Senate.
Senate President Ty Masterson, an Andover Republican, has repeatedly said it is not a priority. Speaking to The Star earlier this year, Masterson said he wanted to see more evidence before moving forward.
State Sen. Mike Thompson, a Shawnee Republican who chairs the Senate Federal and State Affairs Committees, told reporters Wednesday that he had not yet decided whether to move the bill legalizing medicinal marijuana forward.
“I feel like this was necessary before we even think about where we’re gonna go with this,” Thompson said. “We’re still in a data collection phase.”
But Sen. Jeff Longbine, an Emporia Republican who sponsored the bill, said he would be surprised if the bill got a hearing even though it addressed many of the concerns expressed Wednesday.
“If we had a thorough vetting and a thorough hearing on Senate Bill 135, we would realize the amount of work that’s gone into it,” Longbine said.
Longbine noted that many of concerns about Oklahoma’s medicinal program were accounted for in the Kansas bill.
But Brian Surber, the deputy director of Oklahoma’s Bureau of Narcotics, told lawmakers Oklahoma’s program had been a disaster for his agency.
To think another state could implement medical marijuana in a better way, he said, “Reminds me of people who support communist regimes and socialism.”
Howe urged lawmakers to wait on any marijuana legalization until the Federal Food and Drug Administration had done further research on dosing and the drug had been removed from the federal narcotics list.
Howe used Kansas City, Missouri, crime rates to push back on arguments often made that legalization of medical marijuana would reduce illegal sales and thereby reduce violent crime..
“They had the three highest murder rates in the history of Kansas City, Missouri despite having medical marijuana,” he said.
And locally, he pointed to more than a dozen teens currently charged with felony murder in Johnson County for murders tied to marijuana deals.
“It’s not meth, it’s not fentanyl, it’s not heroin that people are killing each other over, it’s marijuana,” Howe said.
In recent years, Howe has pursued cases against teens for felony murder in drug cases that involved marijuana as well as Xanax and Adderall.
Speaking to The Star, Howe acknowledged that people in the Kansas City metro were certainly crossing state lines with marijuana purchased in Missouri. But he said that didn’t worry him.
“We’ll treat it the same as we’ve done all the way through this,” Howe said. “I want to target dealers.”
This weekend, legalization advocates have scheduled a demonstration on State Line Road to highlight the difference between Kansas and Missouri’s laws.
Daniel Shafton, president of the Kansas Cannabis Chamber of Commerce, said he’s been surprised that Missouri’s legalization didn’t spur Kansas lawmakers to move quicker on medical legalization and acknowledged that advocates still have an uphill battle.
“The surrounding states as well as the financials of it have not played into the decision making of this process at all, for better or worse,” he said.
Correction: An original version of this story misspelled Brian Surber’s name and used the wrong title for Daniel Shafton.
This story was originally published March 1, 2023 at 3:18 PM.
