North Carolina still has yet to implement a medicinal or recreational cannabis program, and now a Republican senator is speaking out in a last-ditch effort to pass his medical cannabis bill.
To potentially move the medical cannabis bill forward, Sen. Bill Rabon (R) proposed an amendment to a popular House bill on Wednesday so it can only become law if his medical cannabis bill also becomes law, according to a WRAL News report. The House bill would boost physician assistants’ authority to practice without the supervision of a doctor and passed unanimously in the House.
The amendment states that the House bill can only go into effect “only if, and on the date that, Senate Bill 3, 2023 Regular Session, becomes law,” News Observer 7 reports.
Given that the legislative session will likely wrap up in July, time is running out.
Speaker of the House Tim Moore reiterated the shaky status of Rabon’s medical cannabis bill, saying, “I wouldn’t say there’s no appetite [for the bill]; there’s not sufficient appetite.”
The Senate passed Rabon’s amendment in a 35 to 8 vote before also passing the full bill. It may have enough votes to pass the House should it come to the floor, in which case Democratic and Republican members would proceed to vote on it. Though Moore said that the bill doesn’t have support from at least half of the chamber’s Republicans, and it must clear that threshold under an unwritten rule of procedure that the House Republican majority operates under, according to WRAL.
Rabon didn’t indicate whether or not he would modify other House bills in the same way, though his amendment was met with support in the Senate.
Sen. Mike Woodard (D) said, “This is my favorite amendment of the whole session.” Another Democratic Senator, Paul Lowe, similarly said that Rabon’s maneuver was a “very fine amendment.”
Of course, not everyone was in agreement. Sen. Jim Burgin (R) said, “In the spirit of being fair and balanced, I have to disagree with my colleagues.”
Rabon is a cancer survivor and said that smoking illicit cannabis helped to save his life. The senator revealed his experience publicly in front of the state’s General Assembly, detailing his cannabis use more than 20 years ago to ease the pain and discomfort of chemotherapy as he battled cancer.
“I’d light up a joint or whatever you want to call it — I’d never smoked in my life so I wasn’t very good at it — and I’d take about three puffs of marijuana, and my symptoms would go away before you could bat your eye,” Rabon said in May.
It was the first time he had told the story publicly, a rare moment showing a Republican leader speaking positively and openly about drug use.
“It’s the only reason I’m alive today,” Rabon said. “No science behind it. But I can tell you, I know. I know there are tens of thousands of people in this state who can benefit from it just like I did.”
Cannabis is decriminalized in North Carolina. Just a decade after the first states in the country began legalizing recreational cannabis, and nearly 30 years after California became the first state to allow cannabis for medical use, it’s still one of the now-shrinking fraction of states that have yet to usher in a medical or recreational cannabis program.
It seems like North Carolina voters are ready to take the plunge. A February 2023 poll conducted by Meredith College found that 73% of North Carolinians support medical cannabis legalization, compared to 15% who were opposed and 12% who were undecided. There was also majority support across political affiliations, with 91% of Democrats, 64% of Republicans and 77% of unaffiliated voters showing their approval.
