Late in the 2014 legislative session, then-Sen. Brent Steele added a seemingly innocuous amendment to an unrelated 21-page environmental bill.
Steele said at the time the amendment would crack down on drug dealers.
But legislative leaders said they feared it may have been part of a covert effort to legally distribute marijuana in Indiana. And they put a stop to it.
Senate Leader David Long said he confronted Steele about the amendment and Steele denied any ulterior motives.
Long told him it didn’t matter. “It’s gone and it smells,” he recalled telling Steele.
Steele, a Republican from Bedford, did not return multiple phone calls from IndyStar seeking comment for this story.
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His amendment was promoted by people involved with Hoosier Emerging Technologies, according to a person familiar with the legislation. An IndyStar investigation published Sunday found that the secretive investment company has tried for years to cash in on marijuana leglization in Indiana and that its investors included many of the state’s most influential behind-the-scenes political power brokers.
The amendment he offered to House Bill 1307 would have required the state to issue licenses for the distribution of controlled substances, including banned drugs like marijuana.
“For people who distribute controlled substances illegally, they have to get a license from the state of Indiana to do so,” he said at a 2014 meeting of the Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee. “Their failure to comply with this sets them up for a $100,000 penalty for each act of distribution without a license and allows that money to go back to the state of Indiana.”
The committee added the amendment without additional comments or questions. The full Senate approved it a week later. All that remained was for House and Senate lawmakers to work out the differences between their differing versions of the bill — known in Statehouse parlance as “conference committee.”
That’s when legislative leaders got a disconcerting tip about Steele’s amendment.
“The tip was that perhaps the goal of this by the people who were pushing it was to get themselves in a position for licensing on marijuana if it ever became the law,” Long said.
Both Long and House Speaker Brian Bosma oppose the legalization of marijuana.
Bosma said he investigated the amendment and “drew the conclusion it could lead to — and could possibly have been designed to lead to — securing a license for either medical or recreational marijuana,” he said.
Long and Bosma said they were unaware of Hoosier Emerging Technologies at the time.
The little-known limited liability company is registered to Jim Purucker, a longtime alcohol and casino lobbyist.
Purucker did not return messages from IndyStar.
Purucker has pushed for the state’s controversial vaping law that went into effect last year.The law effectively made a single Indiana security company, Lafayette-based Mulhaupt’s Inc., the sole gatekeeper for e-liquid manufacturing licenses in Indiana. The law forced many small businesses that produced and sold e-liquid for electronic smoking devices to close or move operations out of the state.
The regulatory framework established in the vaping law could eventually be used if marijuana was legalized in Indiana, according to two investors in Hoosier Emerging Technologies who requested anonymity.
Lawmakers are now in the midst of overhauling the vaping law. Senate Bill 1 would get rid of the security firm requirements and other portions of the law that a federal court found to be an unconstitutional barrier to interstate trade. With just one week left in the 2017 legislative session, House and Senate lawmakers are still working out their differences over the bill.
Steele chose not to seek re-election last year and took a job as executive director of the Vapor Association of Indiana, a new trade organization representing Mulhaupt’s and the manufacturers it agreed to work with under the new rules Steele helped approve.
Steele also had legislation drafted in 2013 that would have legalized medical marijuana in Indiana. Like the vaping law, it included language that would have given a single security company a key role in regulating the new industry.
credit:indystar.com