Illinois’s governor says that while he’s “incredibly proud” of the state’s progress in repairing the harms of marijuana prohibition, he’s “not satisfied” yet and pledged to continue to promote equity in the legal cannabis industry. He also took a jab at surrounding states that have yet to enact legalization and estimated that 25 percent of Illinois’s cannabis sales come from out-of-state visitors.
During a speech at an International Cannabis Bar Association (INCBA) event on Thursday, Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) touted his state’s social equity initiatives, arguing that Illinois has been the most effective in the country at ensuring that the legalization is paired with reparative justice for those most impacted by criminalization. But he said he wants to do more.
“It hasn’t been easy. We have more work to do—there’s no doubt,” the governor, whose name is being floated as a potential Democratic vice presidential nominee, said, as Green Market Report first reported. “I’m not satisfied with where we are. We have a long way to go to repair the damage done by the war on drugs.”
“I’m really hopeful that the cannabis industry will continue to bring opportunity and wealth to communities of color for decades to come,” he said.
Pritzker also touted a study published by the state’s Cannabis Regulation Oversight Office this month, which found that 60 percent of all adult-use marijuana business licenses granted by regulators have been issued to minority- or women-owned businesses.
The study was released about a week after the 100th social equity-owned marijuana store in Illinois opened its doors.
The governor said the state’s legalization policy that he signed into law was “carefully crafted to accomplish a model of what common-sense equity-focused cannabis policy can look like.”
“We’d seen the other states and the direction they had gone, and they had failed to, in my view, get it right and were trying to play catch-up afterward,” he said. “We wanted to start from the very beginning, trying to get it right.”
Pritzker also argued that federal legalization will be needed in order to better ensure equity in the cannabis market.
“Equity demands that we go at this at the federal level,” he said at the INCBA event.
At the same time that Illinois officials have worked to distinguish their market from other legal states in terms of social equity achievements, it also hasn’t been shy about promoting the overall economic success of the industry, which saw just under $2 billion worth of marijuana in calendar year 2023.
A solid fraction of those dollars, the governor noted on Thursday, have come from what he called “cannabis tourists” who reside in prohibitionist states and visit Illinois to buy regulated marijuana.
“People from Indiana, people from Iowa, people from Wisconsin, Kentucky, drive across the border and buy something in a dispensary in Illinois. Now, they’re not supposed to drive back over the border to their home states, so I assume they’re just staying in Illinois,” he said, drawing laughs.
Pritzker has frequently joked about the fact that Illinois is benefiting from the lack of legal access in surrounding states. Going back to his State of the State address in 2020, he said out-of-state dollars will end up coming to Illinois and paying taxes for cannabis products that bolster the state’s coffers.
Meanwhile, also this month, the Pritzker administration announced that the state-legal cannabis industry passed the $1 billion sales mark for the year on July 1—about two weeks ahead of when that milestone was reached in the prior calendar year.
Also, Illinois officials in recent months have eyed making changes to how hemp-derived cannabinoids are regulated, but a proposal to do that failed to make it out of the General Assembly this session.
Separately, state senators earlier this year took up a bill that would have legalized psilocybin and allowed regulated access through service centers, where adults could use the drug in a supervised setting.
The state also gave preliminary approval in March to add female orgasmic disorder, or FOD, as a medical cannabis qualifying condition.
Photo courtesy of Max Pixel.
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