"The Safe Communities, Parks and Schools Act of 2016" Filing Announced

The Attorney General today [August 25] announced the filing of 15-0052, “The Safe Communities, Parks and Schools Act of 2016”. The initiative measure ensures a statewide commitment to pursuing public policy that protects the health, safety and well-being of our children and adolescents. The measure also intends to promote individual freedom, and create a fair, enforceable set of taxes and regulations for the commercial cannabis industry. The state regulations are crafted with a unique 21st-century California-style approach that will protect our communities and embolden California’s prosperity.

Our 2016 initiative effort - The Safe Communities, Parks and Schools Act of 2016 - has the following goals:

• Craft robust and effective public policy that will improve our communities and protect our children from underground commercial cannabis activity - both the unlawful sale as well as the reckless manufacture.
• Establish comprehensive statewide regulations for the commercial production, distribution, and sale of cannabis that integrate the commercial medical and adult-use businesses into a streamlined process.
• Promote sustainable environmental practices that have a positive effect on our parks and natural resources.
• Adopt modest sentencing reform, reducing the penalties for certain non-violent cannabis-related felonies; while maintaining or enhancing the existing punishment for environmental crimes and the use of firearms by criminal enterprises. Our aim is to continue the goals of Prop 47 and significantly curtail the racial injustice in our criminal justice system.
• Give tax revenues back to the community in the form of treatment programs, state park restoration projects, and scientifically-based cannabis research — including further studies on the medical benefits of cannabis and tetrahydrocannabinols.

Our team has worked extensively with community leaders and state government officials to adopt a robust and effective regulatory program to jump-start the legal commercial cannabis industry. The Safe Communities, Parks and Schools Act of 2016 re-affirms and protects the rights of patients under Proposition 215, and makes a broader commitment to ending the inequality and racial injustice in our state. Let’s agree to a new approach to cannabis.

To read the text of the measure, click here.