Republican members of Virginia’s House of Delegates on Monday voted down a bill that would have permitted legal sales of marijuana later this year, delaying any movement on the issue until at least mid- or late-2023 — if not even later than that.

The party-line 5-3 vote in the House’s General Laws Subcommittee dashed the hopes of many Democrats and marijuana legalization advocates, who earlier this month cheered the Virginia Senate’s approval of a bill that would have sped up the timeline of legal sales by allowing existing medical dispensaries and industrial hemp farmers to start selling to the general public in September. That would have made Virginia the first jurisdiction in the Washington region to allow legal sales.

The vote also served as evidence of the impact of the political shift in Richmond, where earlier this year Republicans took control of the House while Democrats narrowly retained the Senate. It was last year — when Democrats controlled both chambers — that lawmakers passed a bill legalizing the possession and home cultivation of small amounts of marijuana, with full retail sales set to begin in 2024.

Advocates pushed for a quicker timeline for sales to begin, which the Senate bill offered, as well as spelling out how revenue from marijuana sales could be used to benefit minority communities long impacted by the war on drugs. Republicans, though, have been more divided on how to proceed, with some offering their own alternative bills to creating a legal market and others saying they opposed legalizing sales at all. Speaking ahead of Monday’s vote, they said they needed more time before the legislative session ends in mid-March to pass a comprehensive bill.

“There’s still a lot of unknowns in this,” said Del. Jeff Campbell (R-Smyth). “I think this is a bigger issue than we can correct in two weeks time. The imperative is we continue to study this over the year and get this right.”

Democrats on the subcommittee, meanwhile, urged their Republican counterparts to let the bill move forward.

“Currently if we don’t have a bill that gives us a well-regulated adult-use market amidst the back drop of legalization in Virginia, we are basically providing a year for the growth and strengthening of the illicit market,” said Del. Dawn Adams (D-Richmond). “The longer we wait to have a regulated market… the harder it will be to take control or even compete with that illicit market.”

But in a tweet after the subcommittee’s vote, Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert put the blame on Democrats, saying they had rushed a legalization vote in 2021. “Let’s be clear: Virginia Democrats made a great big mess when they legalized marijuana without putting any regulatory or retail structure in place. We are left having to clean up their mess and we will not make it worse by rushing to fix it,” he wrote.

In its own tweet, Virginia NORML, a pro-legalization advocacy group, called the Republican vote “a stunning failure of leadership.” But Marijuana Justice, another pro-legalization organization, cheered the bill’s demise, saying it would have added new criminal penalties that would have targeted Black and brown communities and would have allowed large corporations to get a head start on selling marijuana.

“[The bill] dying is a safety measure for Black & brown Virginia residents,” tweeted Chelsea Higgs Wise, the group’s executive director. “If it was a bad bill and you know it clap your hands.”

Other advocates disagreed with that claim, saying that the bill actually decreased a number of marijuana-related offenses, but without its passage they will remain on the books.

The vote throws into question when legal marijuana sales could actually begin, similar to the situation of other jurisdictions in the Washington region.

The Maryland House approved a bill last week to call a November referendum on whether to legalize sales, with possible sales set to begin as early as mid-2023. The Maryland Senate will debate the measure this week, and could either approve it or adopt a bill that would skip the referendum and simply start the process of creating a legal market. In D.C., moves to legalize marijuana sales remain held up by Congress, with little clarity on when local efforts could be allowed to move forward.

Currently, the only legal means to procure marijuana in Virginia now is through the commonwealth’s medical program, or by growing it at home. Anyone over the age of 21 can grow up to four plants.