Hemp ban dies, after City Council upholds Mayor Johnson’s veto of the measure

A sharply divided City Council on Wednesday upheld Mayor Brandon Johnson’s veto of a Chicago ban on hemp-derived products, despite warnings that the unregulated products are endangering children.

Southwest Side Ald. Marty Quinn (13th) told the Sun-Times last week that he had no intention of attempting an override because, “I don’t have the votes.” But that didn’t stop Ald. Anthony Beale (9th), Johnson’s most outspoken Council critic, from trying for an override.

That effort failed — as Quinn predicted that it would — by eight votes shy of the 34 votes needed. The Council’s decision means
hemp-derived products can continue to be sold in Chicago — at least until a federal ban takes effect later this year.

The debate that preceded Wednesday’s vote was an emotional repeat of the arguments on both sides that have been made for months.

Public Safety Committee Chair Brian Hopkins (2nd) said it is “unconscionable and inexcusable” that City Hall is allowing adults and children alike to put their health at risk by buying “an untested, unregulated product from an unlicensed facility that has something in it that gets you high, and you don’t know what it is.”

“I don’t care if people make money selling it [on the] black market. You know what else is illegal and is sold every day? Cocaine, fentanyl, heroin. It’s sold all over the city, but we don’t say, ‘Well, we better let it be sold in gas stations too, because they’re gonna sell it anyway,’” Hopkins said. “These are dangerous, harmful products. Children are getting sick. They need to be banned. And all the rest of this is just an excuse and it’s nonsense.”

Johnson has said he shares concerns about children’s safety. But he warned that a “prohibition-style ban” could harm small businesses, and minority-owned businesses in particular, who were “shut out of he expensive cannabis licensing process and turned to federally legal hemp as a pathway into the marketplace.”

North Side Ald. Maria Hadden (49th) agreed that the City Council needs to find a way to devise “something sensible that does not shut out a market of people who have created businesses because they were shut out of the cannabis industry.”

The City Council also rejected a two-year-plan that would have allowed Chicagoans to use their cellphones to provide recorded evidence of bus, bike lane and crosswalk parking violations. The crackdown was championed by Pedestrian and Traffic Safety Committee Chair Daniel La Spata (1st), who has also tried and failed to convince his colleagues to reduce the default speed limit on Chicago streets to 25 miles per hour.

La Spata’s proposal to unleash what could have been an avalanche of citizen-generated parking tickets raised concerns from business groups who feared it could stifle local commerce.

Hopkins shared those concerns, particularly when it comes to the stretch of Wells Street between North Avenue and Division Street with a thriving night life that includes restaurants, bars and night clubs. The area has no alley or loading docks. Delivery trucks can only pull up on Wells, where there are bikes lanes on either side of the street.

“When I start getting angry phone calls from Budweiser beer trucks and lobster companies — they’re going to really start getting angry when they get orange tickets piling up under their windshield wipers — I have to have something to tell them other than, ‘Get out your checkbook,’ “ Hopkins said on the day La Spata pushed the ordinance through his committee.

The City Council also signed off on $29.1 million in settlements linked to allegations of police misconduct committed by now retired Chicago Police detective Reynaldo Guevara. All four proposed recipients were framed for murders they did not commit.

And Johnson appointed LaKenya White as chief administrator of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA), which has been placed in charge of investigating any allegations against Chicago police officers accused of assisting federal immigration enforcement in violations of Chicago’s Welcoming City ordinance.

White has served as interim chief administrator since former chief Andrea Kersten was forced out amid allegations that she was presiding over investigations biased against police officers.