Democratic candidates for Kansas governor from left to right: State Sen. Ethan Corson, Overland Park Mayor Curt Skoog and State Sen. Cindy Holscher. This week each candidate released a statement on marijuana legalization.
Kansas’s leading Democratic candidates for governor announced their support for recreational marijuana on Tuesday, in a state that remains one of the most restrictive for cannabis.
Within 10 minutes of each other, Sen. Ethan Corson, a Fairway Democrat, and Sen. Cindy Holscher, an Overland Park Democrat, announced their support for legalizing medical and recreational marijuana.
“Nearly every other state in the country now allows some form of medical marijuana, and nearly half have legalized recreational use,” Corson said in a statement.
Corson said that medical marijuana could support people suffering from pain, post-traumatic stress disorder and other serious conditions, and bring in a source of tax revenue to the state. He said he’d support “thoughtful legalization, with commonsense guardrails.”
Holscher, in a video outside of a dispensary in Kansas City, made a case for legalizing marijuana for an additional source of revenue for the state, building up the local cannabis industry and for personal freedom.
“I’m in a parking lot at a dispensary, and it’s full of Kansas plates,” Holscher said. “That’s a lot of Kansas tax dollars going straight into Missouri’s pockets. Most Kansas voters think marijuana should be legal in our state, but because it isn’t, Kansans buy it out of state.”
Overland Park Mayor Curt Skoog, who entered the race just before the filing deadline, said he supports a tightly regulated medical marijuana program and a pathway to recreational legalization if Kansas chooses to move in that direction.
“If Kansas chooses to legalize recreational marijuana, it must be done thoughtfully, with strict regulations, strong impaired-driving enforcement, protections for children, and safeguards for local communities,” Skoog said in a statement.
Marijuana stalls in Kansas
The position staked out by Corson and Holscher isn’t a major departure from Democratic thought in Kansas. Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly has strongly supported legalizing medical marijuana and said she would probably sign an adult-use bill if it reached her desk.
In the most recent legislative session, Holscher introduced a bill to move marijuana from a Schedule I to Schedule III drug, classifying it among less addictive and harmful drugs.
But her bill, like others relaxing marijuana laws, failed to gain steam in a legislative body that has struggled to tackle the topic. The Kansas House passed a medical marijuana bill in 2021, but since then legislation has failed to gain traction.
Senate President Ty Masterson, an Andover Republican who’s also running for governor, was opposed to the bill. It didn’t make it to the floor for the vote.
Kansas remains one of few states that haven’t legalized medical marijuana, decriminalized possession of small quantities of marijuana or fully legalized marijuana, according to Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
Every Republican candidate in the race poured cold water on medical and recreational marijuana at a debate in January.
The lone exception on the Republican ticket is Nick Reinecker, who filed just before the deadline on June 1. In a press release announcing his campaign, he said he’s running on a campaign of de-scheduling marijuana and opposing “marxist ideologies.”
The Kansas City Star
Jack Harvel is the Missouri Politics Insider for The Kansas City Star, where he covers how state politics and government impact people in Kansas City. Before joining the star, he covered state politics in Kansas and reported on communities in Colorado and Oregon. He was born in Kansas City, raised in Lee’s Summit and graduated from Mizzou in 2019.
The Kansas City Star
Ben Wheeler is the Law Enforcement Watchdog Reporter for The Star. He joined The Star after spending the last five years of his career in Memphis, Tennessee where he worked as an investigative reporter focused on law enforcement accountability reporting, covering everything from budgets to Tyre Nichols death at the hands of police officers and the subsequent Department of Justice pattern or practice investigation.
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