The legislation would set up a Board of Marijuana Control to help implement and regulate the law and would prohibit smoking pot in public. Vermont lawmaker moves to legalize marijuana

A state senator in Vermont on Tuesday introduced legislation to make recreational marijuana legal in Vermont that, if passed, would make the Green Mountain State the first in the U.S. to legalize through the state legislature.

Vermont state Sen. David Zuckerman’s bill, S. 95, would allow adults 21 and older to possess up to an ounce of marijuana and create a regulatory structure to monitor the cultivation and sale of marijuana in the state.

The legislation would set up a Board of Marijuana Control to help implement and regulate the law and would prohibit smoking pot in public.

“More than 75 years of criminalizing marijuana has failed to prevent marijuana use,” the bill says, arguing for marijuana use to be treated similar to alcohol.

“I’m fairly confident we have a majority,” Zuckerman, a member of the Progressive Party, told POLITICO in an interview earlier this month. Several polls show that a plurality of Vermont voters support legalizing recreational cannabis.

In Vermont, recreational marijuana is already decriminalized and medical marijuana is legal.

If the bill were to pass, Vermont would become the first state to legalization recreational cannabis through the state legislature — Colorado, Washington state, Oregon, Alaska and Washington, D.C. all passed their legalization measures through ballot initiatives. The Rhode Island legislature is looking at the possibility of a recreational legalization bill as well.

Legalizing recreational marijuana would bring in somewhere between $20 million-$75 million in tax revenue for Vermont annually, according to a Rand Corporation study commissioned by Gov. Peter Shumlin and released last month. Zuckerman said he thought direct tax revenue would be on the lower end of that estimate, but that Vermont’s economy would benefit also from an anticipated boost in tourism and economic development.

The study, which did not make a recommendation about what action Vermont should take, reported that the costs of regulating a legal cannabis industry would likely exceed those enforcing prohibition, which amount to less than $1 million per year.

Several experts working in Vermont suggested that the legislature will move slowly on the marijuana legalization bill and likely won’t pass it until next year.

Shumlin, a Democrat who was narrowly reelected for a third term by the state legislature in January, has expressed cautious support for legalization. “I continue to support moves to legalize marijuana in Vermont but have always said that we have to proceed with rigorous research and preparation before deciding whether to act,” he said in a press release accompanying the Rand report.

The governor has urged state officials to reach out to their counterparts in Colorado and Washington to hear feedback on what has worked and not worked with their legalization laws.

Several Vermont officials have visited Colorado to observe the effects of legalization in that state, and State Police Lt. John Flannigan said that Colorado had made “some mistakes” in its implementation.

Democrats control both the Vermont House and Senate.

At least five states are preparing to vote on legalization of recreational marijuana in 2016 — Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada. There are efforts to put the issue on ballots in Florida, Missouri and Montana.

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