Republican Majority Leader Paul Paul Gazelka says the state Senate is *not* going to pass a bill during the 2020 session to legalize recreational marijuana in Minnesota. Gazelka says, “We did a hearing on that last year. We brought in people from Colorado and all of the data was bad: Homelessness rates were up. Accident rates were up. Mental health problems were up.”

Governor Tim Walz supports legalizing recreational marijuana, and House Democratic Majority Leader Ryan Winkler said he plans to introduce a bill at the beginning of the 2020 session which would be “the state-of-the-art in the country.”

Gazelka says he’s willing to explore ways of reducing the cost of *medical* marijuana “as long as we’re not creating a path that makes it easier to have recreational marijuana. That is what happened in Colorado. The way they set up their medical marijuana made it so easy that it instantly became recreational.”