The Maryland House of Delegates passed a bill Friday that would allow voters to decide whether to legalize cannabis.
If House Bill 1, sponsored by House Judiciary Committee Chair Luke H. Clippinger (D-Baltimore City), successfully makes it through the Senate chamber, voters can expect to see the question on the 2022 general election ballot.
“We’re at the beginning of an important process where we begin to look again at how we have treated the substance — cannabis,” Clippinger told the chamber Friday. “The thousands and thousands and thousands of people we have incarcerated because of it.”
“And those thousands of incarcerations have not made us any safer,” he continued.
The measure was passed on a vote of 96-34 with no debate.