Michigan groups propose flurry of marijuana proposals

Michigan's political scene is lighting up with marijuana talk — finally, critics say.

Years behind other states, Michigan is seeing competing groups form rapidly to push for ways to legalize the drug, with players possessing more political savvy, more money and more conservative politics than in the past.

Their appeals? The promise of a rush of tax dollars for cash-strapped government budgets, tens of thousands of new jobs, safer access to cannabis for medical users and fewer nonviolent stoners taking up police attention and jail space.

"The first thing we're saying is regulate it and the second thing is, let's bring in tax revenue," said Matt Marsden, spokesman for the Pontiac-based Michigan Cannabis Coalition.

On Friday, the group filed language for a ballot proposal with the Board of Canvassers in Lansing. It's one of three statewide groups to announce this week their rapid moves to put proposals on the statewide ballot in November 2016, a presidential election sure to have a big voter turnout.

If the board grants approval to Marsden's group, expected in early May, the Michigan Cannabis Coalition would have 180 days to collect at least 252,000 signatures — more would be needed because some are inevitably ruled invalid by election officials.

To circulate petitions, "we're going to use a lot of volunteers, but we've also retained the best signature collecting company in Michigan, if we need it. And we're going to use the GoFundMe option" on the Internet to help raise the $1-million expected tab, Marsden said.

The Michigan Cannabis Coalition is "a collective bunch of business groups in Oakland County — some real-estate guys, some investors, some agriculture guys — and we've been seeing all the problems in Lansing with raising revenues," said Marsden, a former legislative staffer for several lawmakers, now public affairs boss of the RevSix Data political consulting firm.

Members of the group, virtually all Republicans, have watched as Ohio politicos stoked plans to put a pot proposal on November ballots in a "big, monopoly way," said Marsden, 41, of Clarkston.

"They're going to have five big growers come in and control everything. Personally, as a Republican free-market guy, I find that objectionable," he said. Marsden's group would spur more economic growth by keeping the industry open to entrepreneurs, while letting Michiganders grow up to four plants at home for personal use — no sales allowed, and only if their local community approved, he said.

Two counties away in Lansing, "We're rarin' to go," said attorney Jeffrey Hank, spokesman for the Michigan Comprehensive Cannabis Law Reform Committee.

The group's goals include preserving Michigan's medical marijuana act, passed by 63% of state voters in 2008; taxing retail sales of marijuana at 10%, and letting Michiganders grow as many as 12 plants at home — "but you couldn't sell it; if you want to sell it, you have to get a license," said Hank, 34, who defends marijuana users in court cases.

"We've studied how this is working in other states and we've got a new and improved model," he said. The 10% cap on a marijuana sales tax would prevent the levy from going too high, as it has in Colorado, where an underground gray market for untaxed pot persists, he said.

"Our proposal is much more broad" than those of competing groups, said Hank, who defends marijuana users charged with drug offenses. The group includes numerous Democrats and other liberals but also some Libertarians and other conservatives, he said.

"Within a week or so, we'll go to the board of canvassers with this," Hank said Friday. The proposal wouldn't change Michigan's medical marijuana act except to allow for the licensing of retail stores, called dispensaries, many of which are operating in Michigan under the radar Attorney General Bill Schuette, who has repeatedly declared them illegal.

Without legal dispensaries, medical users often turn to street-corner drug dealers, said state Rep. Mike Callton, R-Nashville, who withdrew his bill to legalize dispensaries from a vote in the state House last year when law-enforcement groups lobbied hard against it, he said.

It may be that state voters will need to step up and approve a proposal that allows for dispensaries if Lansing lawmakers balk again this year, Callton said. Michigan is in a shrinking minority of states for refusing to allow dispensaries.

Only three of the 23 medical-marijuana states — Hawaii, Montana and Michigan — fail to allow some form of dispensaries or stores for adult users, said Karen O'Keefe, a Grosse Pointe Farms native and state director for the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C.

"And of those, Hawaii is very likely to approve dispensaries this year," O'Keefe said Friday.

Another largely Republican effort is labeled the Michigan Responsibility Coalition.

"This is coming from serious GOP leadership — it's not some hippie pipe dream," said Tim Beck, 63, a retired health-insurance executive and longtime Detroiter who recently retired to a rural area west of Kalamazoo.

The Michigan Responsibility Coalition is pushing for Lansing lawmakers to act. But if they don't do so soon, it will launch a petition campaign for its own ballot proposal, said Beck, who has split with many long-time allies in the movement to "free the weed" over his support of the coalition's plan.

Beck is widely known for spending about $200,000 over the last dozen years to bankroll community ballot proposals on marijuana. He declined to give details of the group's proposal, saying "it's still in the hands of our attorneys," but he said it would "to some degree" modeled after Ohio's proposal. Critics call it a monopoly, but Beck has said he cares not who profits, only that marijuana be legalized in his lifetime.

"This would set up a group of investors who would control the wholesale market for marijuana" with "all the tax money going to the townships and cities" — with none for Michigan's widely unpopular state legislators to spend, he said.

Contact Bill Laitner: 313-223-4485 or blaitner@freepress.com.