Wisconsin’s Republican Senate majority leader says it’s possible that the legislature could pass a medical marijuana legalization bill in the 2025 session, though he’s cautioning that his chamber likely will not go along with a prior proposal from Assembly GOP leadership to establish state-run dispensaries.
During an interview with WISN-TV that aired on Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R) weighed in on a variety of issues that lawmakers can expect to take up this year, including potential medical cannabis legislation.
“I think there are members of our caucus who are supportive of medical marijuana,” he said. However, he said the “challenge” with an Assembly reform proposal spearheaded by GOP leadership last year is its call to have the state operate dispensaries.
“I think from our caucus standpoint, and my standpoint, is just having a certain number of dispensaries run—growing the size of government—doesn’t seem to be the best way to do it,” he said.
“If a medical marijuana bill is proposed and potentially successful it’s going to have to be prescribed by a doctor, through probably a pharmacy,” LeMahieu said. “But it just can’t be a backdoor to legalizing recreational marijuana—so that will be obviously the concern of our caucus.”
Asked whether he felt a medical marijuana bill stood a chance of passage in the new year, the majority leader affirmed he felt that was possible. But he also reiterated that a state-run dispensary model would be a red line that the chamber wouldn’t cross.
At this point, LeMahieu said he hasn’t spoken to Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R), who sponsored the prior legalization bill, about the issue heading into the new session.
Meanwhile, the governor of Wisconsin recently said that residents of the state should be allowed to propose new laws by putting binding questions on the ballot—citing the fact that issues such as marijuana legalization enjoy sizable bipartisan support while the GOP-controlled legislature has repeatedly refused to act.
Gov. Tony Evers (D) said during a press conference that he will be including a proposal in his 2025-27 biennial budget to give citizens the right to put forward ballot initiative to enact statutory or constitutional policy changes if a majority of voters approve them.
Whether the legislature will heed Evers’s latest budget request for the policy change is uncertain. Lawmakers have previously declined to act on his other budget proposals, including those calling to enact legalization of recreational or medical cannabis.
Evers said last month that marijuana reform is one of several key priorities the state should pursue in the 2025 session, as lawmakers work with a budget surplus.
Days after he made the remarks, a survey found the reform would be welcomed by voters in rural parts of the state. Nearly two thirds (65 percent) said they support legalizing cannabis.
Last May, the governor said he was “hopeful” that the November 2024 election would lead to Democratic control of the legislature, in part because he argued it would position the state to finally legalize cannabis.
“We’ve been working hard over the last five years, several budgets, to make that happen,” he said at the time. “I know we’re surrounded by states with recreational marijuana, and we’re going to continue to do it.”
But the GOP-controlled legislature has so far failed to pass even limited medical cannabis legislation, even the conservative bill filed last January. Republicans have also consistently stripped marijuana proposals from the governor’s budget requests.
A Wisconsin Democratic Assemblymember tried to force a vote on a medical cannabis compromise proposal last year, as an amendment to an unrelated kratom bill, but he told Marijuana Moment he suspects leadership intentionally pulled that legislation from the agenda at the last minute to avoid a showdown on the issue.
That move came as the GOP speaker retreated on his own limited cannabis legislation that a top Republican senator criticized as anti-free market because it would’ve created a system of state-run dispensaries.
Wisconsin’s GOP Senate president says she’s “hoping to have a conversation” in the legislature this month about legalizing medical marijuana in 2025—though the Republican Assembly speaker still represents “an obstacle,” she added.
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Meanwhile, the state Department of Revenue released a fiscal estimate of the economic impact of a legalization bill from Sen. Melissa Agard (D) in 2023, projecting that the reform would generate nearly $170 million annually in tax revenue.
A legislative analysis requested by lawmakers estimated that Wisconsin residents spent more than $121 million on cannabis in Illinois alone in 2022, contributing $36 million in tax revenue to the neighboring state.
Evers and other Democrats have since at least last January insisted that they would be willing to enact a modest medical marijuana program, even if they’d prefer more comprehensive reform.
Photo courtesy of Mike Latimer.
Wisconsin’s Republican Senate majority leader says it’s possible that the legislature could pass a medical marijuana legalization bill in the 2025 session, though he’s cautioning that his chamber likely will not go along with a prior proposal from Assembly GOP leadership to establish state-run dispensaries. During an interview with WISN-TV that aired on Sunday, Senate Read More
