Ohio Republican lawmakers want to raise taxes. Specifically, they want to raise taxes on recreational weed by 50% while making it less potent and redirecting all of its tax revenue into their own grubby little hands.

Just like they’ve resurrected a zombie version of their proposal to overhaul Ohio higher education and turn our institutions of higher learning into a national laughingstock, they have also brought back to life their proposal to rewrite the legal weed law that 57% of Ohio voters passed in 2023.

The Statehouse News Bureau’s Sarah Donaldson reports they want to “fast track” Senate Bill 56. The proposal from Tipp City Republican state Sen. Steve Huffman would raise the excise tax on product sales from 10% to 15%, which is a 50% increase.

Not only does he want to charge Ohioans more for legal weed, he wants to make it less potent, placing more restrictive limits on THC in products with a 35% max for plant products and 70% for concentrates and extracts. Huffman also seeks to limit home grow from 12 allowable plants per household down to six.

As ever though, it’s the money that really tells the story. The bill proposes to take all the weed revenue away from the addiction services and community programs that voters chose, and to redirect it into the General Revenue Fund so that Ohio lawmakers can do whatever they want with it.

Ohio Senate Republican lawmakers started making plans to attack the voter-passed law immediately after voters passed it. That was held up most notably by Republican state Rep. Jamie Callender of Concord in the Ohio House.

While Callender held the line throughout 2024, Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman has now become Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman and he has retained a deep desire to overturn the voters’ will and reshape the law he opposed to his own liking.

After coming online in August 2024, the state’s recreational marijuana sales surpassed $242 million by late December.

An Ohio Ohio State University Drug Enforcement and Policy Center study from August 2023 estimated the potential annual tax revenue from legalizing marijuana under Issue 2 ranges from $276 million to $403 million in the fifth year of an operational cannabis market.

That’s what Ohio Republican lawmakers want to grab, and jack it up even more with a higher tax rate.

Under the voter-passed law, revenue from weed sales goes to an adult use tax fund, the cannabis social equity and jobs fund, the host community cannabis fund, the substance abuse and addiction fund, and the division of cannabis control and tax commissioner fund.

Republican lawmakers last year proposed redirecting the money toward law enforcement and building more jails. Now they’re proposing to just put it in the general fund where they can have a free hand to spend it how they please.

But voters have already decided how this revenue should be spent, and lawmakers trying to overturn that in a blatant cash-grab is just another flagrant insult.

“Pay more money for worse weed — while we pillage the profits from the community chest.”

That’s a helluva scam to try to run on Ohio voters, again.

Even the knuckleheads selling dirt in the dorms weren’t this bad at business.