In recent months, rising numbers of vaping-related pulmonary illnesses and deaths across the country have raised alarm bells about a method of consuming marijuana and tobacco that was once assumed to be safer than smoking. Efforts to understand the root causes of these medical cases—146 in New York, as of October 22—are ongoing. The public health concern around vaping is mounting just as state politicians are gearing up to try to accomplish in 2020 what they couldn’t in 2019: Passing legislation to fully legalize marijuana for those over 21.
In the last legislative session, State Senator Liz Krueger, a primary sponsor of the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act, was scrambling at the 11th hour to include all the provisions her colleagues said they would need in order to support the bill. Given that several senators were still on the fence at the end of the last session, it’s unclear whether the bill would have passed had it come to a vote. Some of the concerns downstate senators raised were related to public health issues such as youth cannabis consumption or the risk of people driving while high.
But Krueger says she thinks the current concern around vaping will only increase the chances of the bill passing this time around.