From the Indiana Statehouse…Panel Backs Raising Smoking Age, Free Textbook Bill Proposed…

— (AP) Indiana’s legal age for buying tobacco products would increase from 18 to 21 under a bill backed by a House panel. The House Public Health committee voted 9-0 on Monday to support the measure. The bill is sponsored by Democratic Rep. Charlie Brown of Gary. Brown also wanted to increase Indiana’s $1 per pack cigarette tax to $3, but that provision was stripped out by the committee.

–(NETWORK INDIANA)  The parents of Indiana schoolchildren pay a fee for textbooks, amounting to about 100 dollars a year in many cases. That may soon change. A House bill proposed by Michigan City Democrat Scott Pelath, the former House Majority Leader, would establish a fund for reimbursing schools for that cost. Indiana is one of only eight states in the nation that still don’t provide free textbooks.

–(NETWORK INDIANA)   Fatal overdoses would mean longer prison sentences for drug dealers under a bill passed by the Indiana House. The bill is among several requested by Governor Holcomb to fight the opioid epidemic.The bill takes the most serious possible drug dealing charge and goes one level higher if the user dies. For cocaine, meth and opioids, that would mean an extra 20-to-40-year prison term. Less serious drugs could carry as little as three years.

–    (AP)   An Indiana Senate is taking up a bill targeting hate crimes. The meeting of the Senate Corrections and Criminal Law committee comes after committee members delayed taking action on the bill last week. Bills targeting hate crimes have failed in recent years and the state is one of just five without laws against crimes motivated by biases, such as race, gender, religion and sexual orientation.