As the U.S. DEA moves to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug, and state lawmakers grapple with a medical marijuana bill yet again this legislative session, Democratic state senator Graig Meyer is clear in his belief that cannabis prohibition must end. 

NC state Sen. Graig Meyer Credit: Courtesy of the subject

Meyer, who is running for reelection to represent Orange, Caswell, and Person Counties and previously served four terms in the state House, released a campaign ad last month called “Two Stops.” 

It’s a (fictionalized) depiction of the experiences of a white man and a Black man, each caught smoking weed by a police officer. The white man ends his day at the golf course while the Black man goes to jail. We talked with Meyer about the ad and the status of local marijuana laws as the short legislative session gets underway.

INDY: Tell me about the vision behind the “Two Stops” ad.

Meyer: I introduced the Marijuana Justice and Reinvestment Act in the last legislative session, and did a little bit of PR about it (including the column that I ran two years ago on 4/20 in the INDY) and reintroduced it in this year’s session. In this year’s session, we actually started to see some traction on Senate Bill Three [the medical marijuana bill sponsored by Senator Bill Rabon]. I continue to want to put pressure on the legislature to have goals that are not fulfilled by SB 3. We wanted to do an ad that would move beyond the inside political circles to change the public conversation. And we’re really happy because we got an ad that went super viral—4 million views over the weekend [of April 20], [including] tons of people that would have never seen a straight campaign ad. 

And [the ad] is elevating the specifics about racial injustice in marijuana policy but also elevating having a five point standard for marijuana legalization: legalizing it—which is related to decriminalization—and then regulating it, producing it, taxing it, and reinvesting it. 

I want to do so much more to talk about the importance of reinvesting the money we can make off of marijuana into the communities that have been hurt the most by the war on drugs: Black communities, poor communities. And we also have the chance, if we really do production well, to make sure that this is an industry that’s helpful to rural communities.

You said there’s traction now around the medical bill. Do you feel like there’s traction around recreational legalization or decriminalization? What are you looking to push while working with a Republican supermajority?

The medical bill passed the Senate and it’s been stalled in the House and I don’t know what’s gonna happen with it this legislative session. But there’s some reasons why it’s just not the best approach. As the bill is written, the program would cost the state $38 million more than it would bring in every year. That just doesn’t make any sense, to run a program that can’t even pay for itself. And when you talk to folks about marijuana legalization, whether people are a user or not, one of the main things that they know is that we should be regulating and taxing it so we can make money off of it. And we probably would make a lot of money off of it. So we should be moving as quickly as we can towards a policy that generates the maximum amount of revenue for the state. That, I think, requires full legalization. 

How does your legalization bill compare with what other states have passed?

Our bill would be the best in the country because it learns from every single state that’s come before us. In particular, it would be the best on regulation. We’re in a really bad spot [today] for public health because we essentially have the Wild West in the CBD market, where there’s no regulation on CBD products, including THC-A. And then we still have an illegal marijuana market, we really have an opportunity here to move to a regulated market that learns the lessons about how to have effective labeling and dosage that can reduce some of the direct harms to people, but also a market that has a lot of controls that will take advantage of the things that we’ve learned about how to reduce alcohol and tobacco abuse and addiction and how to reduce teen consumption. 

So for instance, in my bill, there’s a complete prohibition on marketing. This is a product that doesn’t need any help. We don’t need to have marketing campaigns that are slyly attractive to teenagers. We should do the opposite. We should have money that’s spent directly on helping to educate teenagers about why marijuana usage is so damaging to their developing brains. 

And if we do it right, we can learn from other states. We can also learn from our own past with how we’ve really developed much better public health habits around tobacco and alcohol. 

Credit: Photo from Unsplash

The criticism of sports betting, which was legalized recently, has centered around the big companies coming in to make money at the cost of North Carolinians. I’ve heard similar worries that legalization in the hemp/marijuna industry would allow big companies to make money at the cost of citizens. Is that addressed in the bill?

That’s really about the production and distribution. SB 3 has what’s called vertical integration to the market. One company would grow it, produce it, and sell it to you in retail stores. That’s the exact opposite of what we do with alcohol, where we have a split market where you cannot be the same company that does any of those three things. In North Carolina, with hard alcohol, we have state distribution. We break up the industry so that you can’t really have any monopolies. 

And I think most North Carolinians want to make sure that when we do legalization, that we do it in a way that as much of the profit from the industry comes back to North Carolina as possible. If we give these vertical monopolies to large multinational corporations, then we’re throwing away our chance to make money off of this, including for farmers who want to farm it, companies that want to produce it. 

The one area where I would probably like to see a limit on local investment is nobody wants a Wild West situation with a pot shop on every corner like you’ve seen in some of the states that legalized early. We have a great example in the way that we do distribution through the state ABC system of hard alcohol. We end up with some of the highest tax revenues of alcohol of any state and some of the lowest abuse numbers. I would be in favor of a very controlled distribution and retail sales system.

But I want North Carolinians to be able to farm it, produce it and make money off of that side of the industry.

You mentioned the “Wild West” of marijuana products. Does hemp, delta-8, delta-10 THC-A all coming into the market over the past few years put a new urgency behind this?

Yes. We’ve got people walking around the streets right now functionally buying unregulated marijuana products in the form of THC-A or other variations. And some of that is going to people who shouldn’t be able to use it, like teens. And it leaves an illegal market where we know that the people who are the most likely to be charged and imprisoned for marijuana are Black folks. When you have some folks walking around doing it illegally and some folks still being subjected to disproportionate criminal justice penalties, we need to fix the system. It’s not really working for anybody except for the retail sales people.

Looking at a map of marijuana policy by state, the South stands out—like we tend to do in a lot of ways—why is that? 

The General Assembly is clearly behind the public willingness. The polling shows that legalization always polls more than 60 percent favorably and medical use polls sometimes 70-80 percent favorably. The General Assembly hasn’t been willing to move on this because Republicans haven’t been willing to move on this.

Democrats need to make this a campaign issue [because] we have a clear distinction here. We understand that this is inevitable, and we’re willing to address it today, and come up with standards that are good for North Carolina rather than setting up another corporation to extract money from North Carolina. We should be talking about this as something that we’re going to deliver for people. The public’s talking about it! People talking about marijuana usage everywhere, including people that don’t use it. We’re not in an era where it’s only potheads who are saying we should legalize it. All kinds of people want to legalize it for all kinds of reasons. People…understand the logic of why we should legalize it at this point.

Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].

Chase Pellegrini de Paur is a reporter for INDY, covering politics, education, and the delightful characters who make the Triangle special. He joined the staff in 2023 and previously wrote for The Ninth Street Journal.