Democrats in the Washington State legislature have once again given up on a plan to legalize home cultivation of marijuana for personal use, opting instead to keep the conduct classified as a felony.
Lawmakers in the House Appropriations Committee did not act on the homegrow bill—HB 1449, from Rep. Shelley Kloba—before a legislative deadline on Friday, meaning it’s now dead for the session.
If enacted law, the bill would have allowed adults 21 and older to grow up to six cannabis plants at home for personal use, with households capped at 15 plants regardless of how many adults reside on the premises. People could also lawfully keep the marijuana produced by those plants despite the state’s existing one-ounce limit on possession.
Kloba and other supportive lawmakers have worked for nearly a decade to pass a law allowing adults to grow a small number of cannabis plants for their own use, but each year, other lawmakers and executive agencies have stood in the way of the proposal.
Kloba’s staff on Friday confirmed to Marijuana Moment that the bill would not move forward this year, saying that the lawmaker “will continue pursuing this policy” but declining to comment further.
Last year, Kloba sponsored HB 2194, which similarly died after not being called for a vote in the House Appropriations Committee.
After last year’s proposal failed to advance, Kloba similarly said she would continue to pursue the reform.
“Every session has its own character and constraints, which so far have meant that the bill has not advanced to the Senate,” she told Marijuana Moment at the time. “But I am not giving up.”
Washington was one of the first U.S. states to legalize adult-use marijuana, passing a ballot initiative in 2012. Growing marijuana for personal use without a state medical card, however, remains a Class C felony, carrying up to five years in prison and up to $10,000 in fines.
Legislative efforts to allow personal cultivation stretch back to at least 2015, but so far each has failed.
This year the proposal had the support of a number of marijuana industry organizations, and it faced considerably less pushback from state agencies such as the Liquor and Cannabis Board, which came out against past homegrow plans. But Democrats nevertheless failed to coalesce around the bill.
“It’s time to make this change,” Kloba said at a House Consumer Protection and Business Committee hearing earlier this month. “We legalized so much with regard to cannabis back when we passed I-502, but what we didn’t allow for was this.”
That committee voted to advance HB 1449 after first adopting three amendments to the proposal, all of which came from Rep. Christine Reeves, a Federal Way Democrat who in past years repeatedly opposed efforts to legalize home cultivation.
Reeves’s changes include requiring state marijuana regulators at the Liquor and Cannabis Board (LCB) to establish traceability requirements to track plants, cannabis harvested from those plants and also waste created by homegrown marijuana. LCB would be further authorized to establish a fee that would be paid by adults interested in growing at home.
Cannabis waste would need to be ground and incorporated into other household waste in order to be legally disposed of.
Commercial cannabis producers would also need to post information for consumers about state law around home cultivation, and LCB would need to publish comprehensive information on its website about home cultivation, including related civil and criminal risks.
A separate amendment from Reeves would require that people engaging in home cultivation in cannabis first obtain liability insurance, such as renter’s insurance.
Reeves’s third amendment specifies that an individual would initially receive a warning from law enforcement if they grow more plants or possess more marijuana than allowed under state law. It also directs law enforcement to consider whether legal marijuana is accessible within a jurisdiction when deciding whether to enforce the state homegrow law.
All law enforcement personnel who currently go to basic training would also need to complete bias training around the war on drugs and the history of cannabis enforcement, including its disproportionate impact on certain communities.
Even after all of Reeves’s amendments were adopted by the committee, she still emphasized that she was “a reluctant yes” on the underlying bill to let Washington adults grow cannabis plants at home.
Reeves said during the hearing that “communities like mine do not want cannabis in their communities,” noting that marijuana businesses are not currently allowed in Federal Way. Possession and use by adults is legal statewide.
Separately in Washington, county courts are tasked with vacating hundreds of thousands of past drug convictions following a 2021 Supreme Court ruling that the state’s simple possession law was unconstitutional. But a recent report finds that jurisdictions across the state are making uneven progress clearing the records.
Photo courtesy of Philip Steffan.
Democrats in the Washington State legislature have once again given up on a plan to legalize home cultivation of marijuana for personal use, opting instead to keep the conduct classified as a felony. Lawmakers in the House Appropriations Committee did not act on the homegrow bill—HB 1449, from Rep. Shelley Kloba—before a legislative deadline on Read More
