Missouri voted on cannabis. Jeff City politicians don’t get to overrule | Opinion

Missouri House Bill 2641, the Intoxicating Cannabinoid Control Act, signed by Gov. Mike Kehoe in April, takes effect Nov. 12. I’ve spent the better part of this fight up close. I testified and helped organize the push to strip cannabis products out of Kansas City’s ordinance to restrict so-called “gas station drugs” such as kratom derivatives — which succeeded — and I went to Jefferson City to make the case in person.

My family does business in the hemp space, so I won’t pretend I come to this without a stake, and I certainly don’t condone use of dangerously addictive substances such as 7-OH. But set aside for a moment the policy debate over hemp-derived products. Whatever you think of them, the way this bill was written should trouble every Missouri voter. You don’t have to be a lawyer to see why.

Start with the most revealing sentence in the bill. Section 195.900.4 declares that hemp-derived products “shall be construed to conform to, and be included in, the definition of ‘marijuana’ under Article XIV of the Constitution of Missouri.” Read that again. The legislature isn’t regulating a product. It’s instructing the courts how to read a word the voters wrote into the constitution — telling them that something the people deliberately placed outside the definition of marijuana should be folded back in. A statute does not get to do that. When a law collides with constitutional text, the constitution wins and the law is void; in Missouri, that is not a close question.

And the voters were clear. In November 2022, more than 1.09 million Missourians — a 53% majority — approved Amendment 3. The text they ratified defines marijuana and then expressly excludes “industrial hemp, as defined by Missouri statute, or commodities or products manufactured from industrial hemp.” That carve-out is constitutional text, and a hemp-derived gummy or beverage is, by any ordinary reading, a product manufactured from hemp.

Changed Delta-9 to ‘total THC’

Watch how H.B. 2641 gets around that. It doesn’t argue the products fall outside the carve-out. It repeals and replaces the statutory definition of “industrial hemp” — shrinking it to stalk, fiber, seed, grain, and research material — and swaps the measuring stick the voters used, from Delta-9 THC to “total THC.” Either way, the result is the same: Products that are hemp by the constitutional standard get decreed marijuana by statute. Only Article XII — a vote of the people — can change what Article XIV covers. A bill passed in Jefferson City cannot. As the Missouri Supreme Court put it in 2002’s State State ex rel. v. Kinder, a statute that conflicts with a constitutional provision must be held invalid.

The bill’s defenders will say it merely aligns Missouri with Washington, since Congress narrowed the federal hemp definition last fall — and, not by coincidence, the federal change takes effect Nov. 12, the very same day as H.B. 2641. But Congress doesn’t define Article XIV. The voters did, against the Delta-9 THC standard both state and federal law used at the time. Borrowing Washington’s definition doesn’t hand the General Assembly a power the constitution withholds, or let a statute edit what the people already ratified.

There’s a second, independent defect. Article III, Section 23 requires every bill to stick to one subject. H.B. 2641 bundles a controlled-substances rewrite with an unrelated, freestanding labor provision — collective bargaining rights for cannabis workers — that was added late, in the state Senate, at a union’s urging. That’s the “logrolling” the rule exists to stop. Missouri enforces it with real teeth: In 2023’s Byrd v. State, the state Supreme Court voided an entire bill over a provision bolted on the same way, warning that it takes “judicial surgery” to save “a bill infected with the otherwise fatal constitutional disease of multiple subjects.”

Consider what the law does in practice. By routing all lawful sales through the limited number of dispensaries licensed under Article XIV — and attaching a felony charge to sales outside that channel — H.B. 2641 closes the existing hemp market rather than regulating it. There are real questions about intoxicating hemp, and lawful ways to address them: age limits, lab testing, child resistant packaging, taxation. None require rewriting what the voters put in the constitution.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The same holds for self-rule: If the legislature can override one voter-approved amendment by statute, it can do it to the next — on any subject. This was never really about cannabis. It’s whether the next amendment you care about means anything once the lobbyists arrive in Jefferson City.

Missourians decided what Article XIV means. The General Assembly doesn’t get to overrule them.

“Paulie” Paul Vega Jr. is an entrepreneur and advocate. He lives in Armour Hills in Brookside.