INDIANAPOLIS — If you’ve ever taken a road trip to Michigan, you might have noticed billboards advertising marijuana dispensaries across the state line.
Tuesday, a big debate over those billboards came up in the Senate’s Homeland Security and Transportation Committee.
The debate was not over the bill itself, but an amendment to House Bill 1390. The amendment would ban billboards in Indiana from advertising for marijuana which is illegal in the Hoosier State.
The debate didn’t center around whether marijuana should be legalized in Indiana. What evolved was a debate around what should be allowed to be advertised on billboards in Indiana and whether those ads are protected by the First Amendment.
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The amendment would ban billboards from advertising for any illegal product, including marijuana, that’s on Indiana’s controlled substance list.
The bill’s author, State Representative Jim Pressel (R-District 20) testified about the number of billboards he sees in his home county that advertise for marijuana dispensaries just over the state line.
“We got billboards all over the place that say, ‘Come to my store and buy this,’” Pressel explained.
“We have trucks, mobile billboards that drive around and sit in front of our parks. That’s unacceptable and it sends a mixed message to the consumer that this product is legal in Indiana, which it is not,” Pressel added.
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The amendment received push back from a handful of witnesses in the advertising and billboard industries.
“Anybody that thinks people are going to go buy marijuana because of an outdoor billboard is living in another world,” Blair Englehart, with the Englehart Group, told lawmakers on the committee.
Englehart said he’d been in the advertising business over 50 years and had never seen anything like this amendment that could have such a negative impact on business.
“This bill is not about marijuana. This is a bill about the state having the right to pick winners and losers. Last time I checked, it’s not the state’s job to determine who wins and who loses,” Englehart added.
“Anybody have one of these?” Ron Braunmeyer with the Outdoor Advertising Association of Indiana asked the committee, while holding up his cell phone.
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“All you have to do is google ‘nearest dispensary’ and it will pop up and give you all kind of dispensaries closet to you. It will tell you how to get there. It will tell you what their products are so when anybody has this in their hand, I see that as a greater threat than a message on a billboard,” Braunmeyer added.
One witness with the state’s largest billboard company, Lamar told lawmakers he’d be willing to sit down and talk about making sure the billboards are placed at a certain distance from schools and parks, like he said already happens with billboards advertising alcohol.
When asked why the amendment dealt only with billboards and not other forms of advertising for marijuana, Pressel replied, “sometimes you need to take little bites of the apple.”
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There were also arguments about the First Amendment, with warning that this amendment would lead to lawsuits.
“The state will be hit so hard with lawsuits not only for the First Amendment, but for the fact that the state is picking and choosing,” Englehart said.
Responding to that concern, Pressel pointed to a court case recently decided in Mississippi last November where the court pointed out that marijuana is illegal in federal law, finding that the First Amendment would not apply when it comes to banning speech regarding an illegal activity like selling marijuana.
