WA House RSG - Committee Meeting
(January 16, 2024) - HB 2194 - Public Hearing

Lawmaker questions focused on potential risks and negative outcomes during mostly supportive testimony on 2024 cannabis home growing legislation.

Here are some observations from the Tuesday January 16th Washington State House Regulated Substances and Gaming Committee (WA House RSG) Committee Meeting.

My top 4 takeaways:

• Committee Counsel Peter Clodfelter explained the impacts of HB 2194, “Legalizing the home cultivation of cannabis” (audio - 1m, Video - TVW).
  • In 2012, the right of adults to grow their own cannabis wasn’t included in Initiative 502 (I-502), but had since become common among states that have legalized the plant. As far back as 2015, legislation had been proposed to allow limited cultivation allowances for those 21 and older, including HB 1614 in 2023. WA House RSG members hosted a hearing in February 2023, then approved the measure. The Washington State House Appropriations Committee (WA House APP) heard the bill later that month, however it was pulled from their schedule and received no further legislative action.
  • In the hearing, Clodfelter referred to the bill analysis, stating that the measure would:
    • Legalizes the production and possession, by a person age 21 or over, of six cannabis plants and the cannabis and cannabis products derived from those plants, on the premises of the housing unit occupied by the person. 
    • Creates a class 1 civil infraction for the production or knowing possession of more than six but fewer than 16 cannabis plants, and specifies it is a class C felony to produce or knowingly possess 16 or more cannabis plants.
    • Modifies real property seizure and forfeiture provisions in the Uniform Controlled Substances Act (UCSA) related to to [sic] cannabis.
      • This was “a term currently used in the context of real properties; seizure and forfeiture; and determining the intent of an offender,” Clodfelter noted.
    • Adds a definition of "commercial activity" to the UCSA.
  • The fiscal note prepared by Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board (WSLCB) staff anticipated “a workload impact of 0.2 FTE LCB Enforcement Officer 2 (LEO2) ongoing as a result of increased complaints and seizures.”Staff projected costs of $26,840 a year, related primarily to salary, benefits, and travel to investigate an estimated 12 complaints and engaged in one seizure per month.
    • Washington State Patrol staff indicated “an indeterminate fiscal impact as investigation time may increase to differentiate between allowable home grown production versus illicit production. We do not anticipate that this impact would be significant.”
    • The Washington State Department of Corrections reported an indeterminate impact of $50,000 or less, as HB 2194 “would likely result in prison and jail bed savings.”
    • The largest expenditures were predicted by officials at the Washington State Department of Commerce (WA Commerce), which forecast that city “law enforcement agencies would incur first year training costs totaling $471,937 plus indeterminate impacts resulting from legalizing the possession of cannabis plants,” while counties would have similar training costs estimated to be $161,928 statewide.

• Committee Co-Chair Shelley Kloba shared her reasons for sponsoring the measure, including implications for personal rights and broader social equity (audio - 4m, Video - TVW).
  • Kloba acknowledged her history of sponsorship on this issue, remarking how I-502 "was very conservative," and she felt that officials exercised caution implementing it. She further felt the initiative did not “appropriately understand the social equity impacts yet,” and officials had “go back with the work of my colleagues here to address some of those things, and I think this is a tiny piece of that as well.”
    • The Washington State Legislative Task Force on Social Equity in Cannabis (WA SECTF) met between 2020 and December 2022, producing a final report which included support for legalization of cannabis home grows.
  • “The fact that cannabis is legal for people over 21, they can walk into a store and purchase it,” Kloba established, “I think we've all gotten used to that.” However, it was “still a class C felony to possess this in plant form,” she said, even after “we've taken a look at other illicit drugs and changed the way we think about those, and yet this stands unchanged.” She stressed, “this is very much designed for personal use, it is very similar to what an authorized patient is able to grow in their home,” and likened the practice to a "recreational hobbyist.” 
  • Kloba mentioned that in 2023, HB 1614 had gotten “hung up” after recommendation by WA House RSG in “the fiscal committees,” the unfortunate recipient of an uncommonly speculative staff briefing on potential impacts to cannabis revenue. Kloba was dubious of any negative effect, comparing it to microbrewing which she felt had “increased the appreciation for good beer. I think that this is also the type of effect that this bill would have.” She asked for support to “fix this situation…so that it is not illegal to grow a plant that you can purchase on the market.”
    • Kloba spoke in Seattle at the March For Homegrow in August 2023. She also touched on her background as a leader on cannabis issues in remarks at an October 2022 event hosted by the Cannabis Alliance, and in a symposium convened by the University of Washington Addictions, Drug, and Alcohol Institute (UW ADAI) in September 2022.
  • Representative Kevin Waters asked Kloba to “talk about what the offense is right now if someone is caught with a home grow [and] how maybe it is at an unfair advantage versus the real drug problem that we are facing right now in the state” (audio - 2m, Video - TVW).
    • Kloba said that the existing class C felony was "a pretty intense penalty" for any number of plants. She noted that after I-502 there was data to suggest that while overall cannabis possession arrests “go down markedly…the disproportionality stayed the same in terms of Black and Brown people getting locked up for cannabis crimes at a much higher rate.” Her understanding was that under the bill such disparities could “diminish overall and that would have a beneficial effect.” She further believed the State didn’t need to be “locking people up for something that probably shouldn't be a crime, and is not a crime in many other states.”
  • Ranking Minority Member Kelly Chambers wanted clarification about whether the arrest statistics measured “all cannabis convictions compared to home grow.” Kloba explained that among “the set of people who get arrested for growing at home…I think that would ultimately cause fewer Black and Brown people to get arrested for it. I don't know that it would change the disproportionality.” She encouraged listening to proponents, and suggested, “that's one of the reasons why the social equity task force had come out with the notion of home grow being one of their recommendations” (audio - 1m, Video - TVW).

• More than a dozen speakers offered supportive testimony for the legislation, several of whom felt that it was consistent with the spirit of the original initiative, or allowed people to better understand the plant and control what they put in their bodies.
  • John Kingsbury, patient advocate and Cannabis Alliance March for Homegrow Organizer (audio - 2m,  Video - TVW)
    • “It's a complex, fascinating, and sometimes frustrating plant,” Kingsbury testified, yet “as of today 23 states plus Washington, DC trust their citizens enough to allow them to grow a few plants at home.” With a single plant being a felony in Washington State, he said this was “on par with unlawful possession of a firearm. This makes no sense.” Moreover, the law was “at odds with the primary purpose behind initiative 502 which was to limit the social and generational harms caused by cannabis prohibition,” he argued.
    • Annually, Kingsbury stated, “we can assume that another 240 or so people will be arrested for growing six plants or fewer, suffering the multiple lifelong consequences” from an arrest, prosecution, fines, and/or imprisonment. Additionally, “another 50 or so people will have their homes dismantled and lose property, but thankfully not be arrested.” All of this for “a substance that we sell like beer, and this will happen at a rate five to seven times greater for Black citizens compared to their White counterparts, and 2.4 to 3.1 times higher for Hispanics, and that disparity seems to be increasing over time.”
    • Continuing the “senseless damage” of criminalizing personal cultivation made no sense to Kingsbury, who was hopeful committee members were “ready to trust Washington citizens as much as the legislators in 23 other states, and end this prohibition and the unnecessary human damage that comes along with it.”
  • Caitlein Ryan, Cannabis Alliance Executive Director (audio - 2m,  Video - TVW)
    • Ryan commented how Washington was “one of two adult use states that doesn't allow for personal use growing.” She noticed as she was “talking to citizens and trying to gain support for this…I would say nearly 98% of people I talked to had no idea that this was illegal…I even had quite a few people stop the conversation and go, ‘Oh my gosh. I need to go home right now.’”
    • “Speaking to this disparity, I will not be arrested for growing a plant at home,” as a Caucasian person suggested Ryan, “as John pointed out people of color are five times more likely to be arrested for growing a single adult use plant at home.” She then referred to analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) which showed minority communities were “eight times more likely to then be convicted of that felony once they've been arrested.” Ryan also mentioned a 2020 economic study by Timothy Nadreau, Research Faculty at Washington State University (WSU), “showing that not unlike craft brewing, people who grow plants at home will most likely buy at a higher price point, higher volume, and more frequently, raising what is possible for State revenue.”
  • Shawn DeNae Wagenseller, Washington Bud Company Co-Owner and Cannabis Alliance Secretary (audio - 1m, Video - TVW)
    • Adults growing their own cannabis was "absolutely no threat" to commercial growers,” Wagenseller testified, as most consumers were "really spoiled with good product" and not prepared to grow cannabis, since “it takes a lot of skill, and a lot of money, and a lot of equipment to put out a good product.” Listing off a variety of insects would-be growers would have to contend with, she knew there were also “a variety of molds and mildews. A lot of people give up and they're happy to go to the store and pay for my product that is nicely packaged…and tested.” 
    • Wagenseller believed “home growers just put a better value on commercially grown product…even if they enjoy their hobby garden.” She didn’t support the practice being “a class C felony like armed robbery,” and encouraged legislators to “pass HB 2194 and erase another page of prohibition.”
    • Representative Kristine Reeves inquired about the enforcement approach of the legislation, remarking that “while we're talking about legalization, and it sounds great and you're calling it a social equity initiative” she wanted to hear about “reduction or minimization of harms from police interaction in the first place” (audio - 3m, Video - TVW).
      • Ryan answered that “passing this bill…eliminates a reason for law enforcement to interact with folks for growing plants at home at all.” Reeves observed, “there's a lot of things that are legal but don't minimize Black interaction with law enforcement.” She was wary “when we use that language and we're using language to justify why we should pass a bill as it pertains to Black and Brown people.”
      • Reeves further asked for clarification on how enforcement worked in HB 2194 from Clodfelter, who responded it “doesn't have explicit provisions about who would be enforcing.” He remembered prior legislation on the topic “specifically sa[id] certain agencies do not have enforcement authority,” but HB 2194 didn’t “state one way or the other” outside of defining the allowed activity. He speculated that “city police, county sheriffs, Washington State Patrol….all have authority to enforce” the UCSA. Clodfelter added that the Washington State Pharmacy Quality Assurance Commission was “not normally an agency that comes up with the cannabis regulations, but they do have general enforcement authority” under the act as well. “I don't know what that would look like, but it doesn't specifically say…what you're seeking to know more about,” he concluded.
  • Bailey Hirschburg, Washington Chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (WA NORML) and I-502 Volunteer Organizer (audio - 2m,  Video - TVW)
    • According to Hirschburg, I-502 represented a “very cautious approach” to cannabis legalization, “and the lack of home growing was one of the most contentious issues that we heard about.” He said there’d been a “clear pattern with now Washington State being an outlier as one of the few states that doesn't allow this.”
    • “I really believe that police enforcement should be focused on larger grows that are criminally connected,” Hirschburg argued, “and I say that realizing that that's a more difficult case to make than our current policy,” where beyond the presence of a plant “you don't really have to prove much.” He doubted that many law enforcement agencies were targeting small grows “because I'm not sure that there are a lot, but it hasn’t impacted the revenue we've seen in other states.”
    • Moreover, he hadn’t heard the personal grows were a “scourge or problem” in other legal states, “and while I'm concerned about the thefts that we've sometimes seen at cannabis businesses, I just don't see a nexus, how a private house with little to no cash is the same as a business that's cash only” carried “the same level of risk.”
    • Hirschburg didn’t understand treating small numbers of cannabis plants “worse, essentially, than we've treated firearms in the home and that's basically what we have right now.” He hoped this could be the “last policy committee I have to talk to” about homegrow.
  • Don Skakie, Homegrow Washington Founder (audio - 2m, Video - TVW)
    • Skakie supported the bill and echoed the sentiment that home growing wasn’t proving to be “problematic” in other jurisdictions, and wasn’t associated with “more diversion to the unregulated market. It's not resulting in youth access and/or to the contraband markets that still exist in non-reformed states.” He felt that home growing “would not become the focus of our lives, but simply just one of the many activities we get engaged in,” and shouldn’t be a felony. “We’re considerate of our neighbors and our community, and we'll continue to do that after this bill becomes law,” said Skakie, hopeful for passage and “further consideration and discussion by your fellow legislators.”
    • Regarding HB 2194 as “very clean and streamlined,” Skakie mentioned that legislation heard by a predecessor committee in 2019, HB 1131, went “into much more detail on what possible amendments might want to be included [if there were changes members] might be looking for but not finding in this bill.”
    • Representative Greg Cheney asked what the price per plant could be, “I know that it's gonna depend on quantity, quality, there's a whole bunch of different factors, but just kind of a range so we can get a sense of that” (audio - 2m, Video - TVW).
      • “You're putting us in a position of saying what would we sell what we're producing…what would we charge to stand on a street corner,” Skakie responded, “and that's not at all what this bill is about. You'd have to talk to people that are in that business.”
      • Hirschburg speculated someone could “struggle to get a hundred bucks” for a poorly grown plant, “if it was grown professionally, which I think very few people that don't have a green thumb could do, probably be worth thousands of dollars.” But he cautioned that cannabis was “a weed any of us can grow…but [to] grow it in quality, to grow it in any quantity takes time and investment of resources.”
      • Following the hearing, Kingsbury offered Cheney a more substantive explanation of the estimate of plant cost, and indicated, “the simple answer is $164/plant to $238.68/plant” after subtracting the cost of cultivation.
    • Reeves allegedly wanted to know about plant waste since “you brought up guns, so that basically created correlation in my mind of what is the safe and proper disposal of these plants.” She hypothesized that if her grandmother passed away, but “I don't know what a marijuana plant looks like…she's got a whole bunch of other plants plus these marijuana plants and my job is to now dispose of her estate.” She was curious if “this bill cover[ed] disposal and ensuring that I, as the executor of her estate, I'm not liable for disposal of these plants improperly” (audio - 1m, Video - TVW).
      • Taylor Gardner, Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs (WASPC) Deputy Director noted the bill didn’t speak to that, stating it was “another one of those perhaps corollaries that we could draw. The other states that have enacted home grow have…provisions like that in their state laws,” suggesting lawmakers look at Nevada’s home growing regulations, claiming, “they've got a pretty robust set of laws on this issue.”
      • Skakie and Hirschburg considered cannabis to be typical garden waste, though Reeves commented they weren’t “helping your argument with that, that correlation.”
      • Colorado officials provide home growing safety rules, which include advice for cannabis waste disposal. Find out about personal cultivation standards in Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia. 
    • Chambers wanted to know if people could produce other cannabis items at home. Hirschburg observed grinding up cannabis over a sieve was all that was needed to make the concentrate kief, “now if you're talking about extraction and…solvents and the equipment needed to do that. No, I couldn't see anything in this bill allowing that type of behavior.” Skakie noted patients already engaged in “non-volatile extraction,” and guessed it was likely “a home grower would make some edibles” (audio - 1m, Video - TVW).
    • Waters wondered about the odor of the plants, “and how you mitigate that.” Having grown as a medical patient, Skakie alleged small gardens didn’t produce the strong smell of a commercial operation, and that “burning cannabis actually hangs in the air, but the growing cannabis dissipates after about 30 feet, 35 feet. So it's not very perceptible…certainly not overwhelming.” He wanted to be a considerate neighbor, and said if anyone ever raised the issue “I would probably take steps to address their concerns” (audio - 2m, Video - TVW).
    • Reeves conjured another hypothetical about the environmental impact if several people formed a neighborhood homeowners association (HOA) to grow their own cannabis, curious if lawmakers should consider “environmental impacts of growing a multitude of plants in a similar space…in a situation where folks who think alike and…decided that part of that HOA is having the ability to grow marijuana plants.” Should communities be “thinking about water runoff, water quality, environmental quality, things around that as part of this bill” (audio - 3m, Video - TVW).
      • Hirschburg replied that he was the newest member of his HOA board and that activity outside of their community’s units could be covered by the bylaws of the property. He also expected the only reasons landlords would have to address home cultivation would be “either based on the nature of the lease or frankly, if [they’re] doing something squiffy and you're trying to control all these people's grows, which the only time I've heard of small grows being criminally connected was a situation like that in Colorado…something like that would still be very illegal. I would assume as envisioned by this bill a bunch of people who have a like-minded community [could] be handled by the normal HOA process.”
      • Skakie had grown in soil as well as hydroponically, and thought “when I was in that situation, again, we're talking about six plants, so it's not really a large amount.” He remarked that he’d had no problem replacing the “growing medium” that helped plant growth, and felt it was safe enough to “put on my grass or in my garden.”
  • Lukas Hunter, Harmony Farms Director of Compliance and Government Affairs (audio - 1m, Video - TVW)
  • Keegan Skeate, Cannlytics Data Scientist (audio - 2m, Video - TVW)
  • Pete Holmes, Former Seattle City Attorney and I-502 Sponsor (audio - 2m, Video - TVW)
    • “When you're the first in the country to confront prohibition, there are lots of unknowns. And as a primary sponsor of I-502 back in 2011, I can tell you that we struggled with home grows,” Holmes told lawmakers. The right was left out of the initiative “in part to understand better the viability of a newly legal, but heavily regulated and taxed, cannabis industry. It has since become clear that Washington consumers deserved the right to grow your own for personal use,” and he argued other states had made this a more viable path.
    • Holmes added that I-502 had intended “to regulate cannabis the same way we regulate alcohol, and alcohol consumers already enjoy the right…to brew their own beer, to ferment their own wine, but most choose to go with commercial products. And we think that the same thing now will happen with the Washington cannabis industry. It is long past time to remove this class C felony.”
  • Vivian McPeak, Seattle Hempfest Founder (audio - 2m, Video - TVW)
    • Acknowledging his history of cannabis activism, McPeak agreed people deserved “quality and purity control, and the ability to choose specific strains.” He expected a “vast majority” would “continue to patronize retail stores just like alcohol so there should be negligible tax revenue impacts, but most importantly there are currently multiple models and states that allowed legal home cultivation.” McPeak advised “for their own protection, I believe that sensible growers will utilize common, affordable charcoal filtration systems to mitigate odor.” He agreed with others’ sentiment that “it's unethical to continue criminalizing small private-use cannabis cultivation when sales, possession, consumption, and commercial production have been legalized.”
  • David Heldreth, Ziese Farms CEO  (audio - 2m, Video - TVW)
    • Heldreth relayed that a 2022 memo from federal officials showed that because cannabis seeds didn’t contain 0.3% THC, they weren’t prohibited under existing law. “They're legally hemp and unregulated in the United States,” he said, allowing “patients and the public to legally access them.”
    • He pointed out that “very pungent” hemp could be grown near daycare or foster care facilities, and “if you're attempting to say that if it's a THC plant that it should be treated differently than when it's hemp that's a bit facetious of an argument.”
    • Heldreth then claimed “if a large group of people are growing cannabis that will have no more runoff than if they were growing tomatoes.” He said his “hemp crop was sprayed with pesticides by the local government, and so I want to second…this statement that pesticides being sprayed on cannabis is an important issue and so we need to have home grow.”
  • Andrew Otwell (audio - 2m, Video - TVW)
    • Otwell didn’t consider HB 2194 to be “an experiment, and will have negligible impact to consumer safety and to the cannabis industry here in Washington.” He felt even “fairly conservative states like Montana and Ohio have included home grow in their adult use laws, and in fact New York and Maryland have in fact updated their laws to allow home grow.” Otwell alleged there was an “embarrassing level of penalty currently associated…with this activity” and a “shameful” degree of punishment. He urged passage of the legislation.
  • Chad Westport  (audio - 2m, Video - TVW)
  • Arthur West  (audio - 2m, Video - TVW)
  • In addition to the 14 people that testified in favor, one hundred individuals signed in to support the bill (Testifying, Not Testifying).

• A law enforcement association representative explained safety concerns around their position as “other” on HB 2194, and a substance prevention stakeholder explained why they didn’t want the bill to move ahead.
  • Taylor Gardner, WASPC Deputy Director (audio - 2m,  Video - TVW)
    • Registering a position of ‘other’ on the proposal, Gardner conveyed the general opinion of their members that they did not support home cultivation, and “would prefer the state maintain its commitment pursuant to I-502 that this industry would remain in a well-regulated commercial setting.”
    • She reported that if lawmakers saw fit to move the bill forward, “we would like to offer some feedback on how to do it more safely.” Gardner invoked the specter of “public safety threats that already plague the commercial cannabis retailers, and we would hate for those kind of threats to follow people home.”
    • Gardner advised modifications to the bill to make it more like HB 1614 from 2023.
      • First, “requirements about safe storage. And rather than building upon that requirement this year, we saw that it was removed. We would urge this committee to require some form of safe storage, and to find exactly how people can meet that requirement
      • “The second thing we would like to note, We…would ask the committee to consider reintegrating 1614's provisions relating to prohibiting home grows where there are family day care providers, foster family homes, and…allowing landlords to retain some kind of right to prohibit homegrowns on their own property in these sensitive places around children.” She aimed to leave “home owners some discretion about how their property is ultimately used.”
      • The “third point…prohibitions on plants being visible from ordinary public view or readily smelled just in consideration of their surrounding environment and neighbors
      • “A fourth point that was in 1614…requirements about marking plants’ containers and products in order to maintain some level of traceability when those plants leave the home grower’s home.”
    • Garder concluded, “safety is ultimately our ultimate focus, and we're happy to contribute to those conversations here.”
  • Scott Waller, Washington Association on Substance Misuse and Violence Prevention (WASAVP) Member  (audio - 2m,  Video - TVW)
    • Waller testified to the “strong opposition” of his organization because they perceived “absolutely no limitations" in HB 2194. Even medical cannabis patients had “limitations about not being able to be seen, you know from the street for instance, or not being readily smelled from a public place or the private property of another housing unit.” He argued the “numerical limits in the law would be almost impossible to enforce” due to a lack of law enforcement personnel, who “would need search warrants to effectively monitor the activities of home grows.”
    • Waller was concerned ”about youth access in homes with cannabis gardens,” and further felt “provisions [were] not strong enough for…prohibiting diversions of home grow products in exchange for money.” Stating he didn’t see a need to “expand beyond what has already authorized with medical cannabis home grows,” he insisted there were “dozens of reasons why expansion should not be allowed.”
  • Later, during the hearing on HB 2320, “Concerning high THC cannabis products,” Cheney asked Beth Ebel, UW Pediatrician and Washington Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics Board of Trustees President, “if the goal is to protect young people from the use of marijuana does it make sense to allow home grows where…we won't have the ability to control the level of THC in those homegrown plants?” Ebel answered that most plants “don't reach that 35% cut off,” which was part of HB 2320. “And also the kids and young people getting [cannabis products were] generally getting it from, from in a place that initiated in the legal market.” She believed “regulation matters,” but “it has less to do with a home grow market” (audio - 2m, Video - TVW).
  • In addition to the two people that testified opposed or “other” on the bill, another 30 people signed in against the measure (Testifying, Not Testifying).

Information Set