Under a beyond-frustrating circumstance, a legislative measure to legalize medical cannabis in Nebraska was killed.
State lawmakers came two votes short of the 33 votes needed to break a filibuster on LB474.
Crista Eggers and Nicole Hochstein, both mothers of children living with epilepsy, feel devastated, broken and in pieces.
“They literally voted my child’s life away,” Hochstein said.
The Nebraska Supreme Court pulled a ballot measure in September that would have allowed voters to decide whether to legalize medical marijuana, because it did not meet the state’s single-subject rule. Petition organizers collected 196,000 signatures.
State Senator Anna Wishart sponsored the bill and said supporters will now begin a new petition effort that will let voters decide on the 2022 ballot.
“People in the state of Nebraska have the right to medical cannabis for medical purposes, period,” Wishart said.
LB474 would have placed limits on the amount a person could have, establish what conditions would qualify, and who could produce, process and dispense cannabis. Some opponents of the bill say they fear if the issue goes before voters, it will pass and open the door to recreational cannabis.
“If we want to avoid recreational marijuana, we are going to have to think about something very restrictive, or we will see it everywhere, and it will be bad,” State Senator Mike Flood said.
Other opponents waged a filibuster, saying it is not medically proven and could do more harm than good.
State Senator Julie Salma pointed to Attorney General Doug Peterson’s opinion, who in 2019 said that the state cannot legalize medical marijuana because it is federally outlawed.
“This is preempted by federal law, which gets to the core of the argument that LB474 is unconstitutional,” Salma said.
According to Wishart, 12 state senators who were previously opposed to her bill changed their vote, and lawmakers like State Senator Ben Hansen suggested amendments that improved the bill.
“One of those was to treat our medicinal cannabis system similar to the way that we treat some of our other pain medication systems through what’s called a PDMP system,” Wishart said. “That got us a lot of votes and a lot of trust on this issue, but unfortunately, we were two votes short of overcoming a filibuster.”
North Platte State Senator Mike Groene was one of the lawmakers to change their minds.
“If we are going to stop recreational marijuana, if we are going to get to the point where good, solid citizens are using this for pain relief, and to get them out of the shadows of illegality, we need to accept this,” he said. “I was deadly against it. I figured, here comes Sen. Wishart again with one of the bills she brought six years ago, but she has cleaned this thing up.”
“When you hear the evidence, how people’s lives have been helped by having access to cannabis for medical purposes, it moves people to change their vote from a no to a yes,” Wishart said.
