By Tom Angell
Every national poll since 2014 shows that more Americans favor legalizing marijuana than oppose it. Medical cannabis consistently gets supermajority support in voter surveys.
Recognizing that they’ve begun to lose the debate with the public about whether or not marijuana laws should be reformed, prohibitionists have increasingly resorted to trying to block voters from even getting the opportunity to decide for themselves whether the cannabis laws in their states should be changed.
At least nine states will vote on broad marijuana policy reform initiatives this November, but in many cases opposing forces filed lawsuits or used other tactics in an effort to keep the measures from appearing on ballots in the first place.
“Marijuana prohibition supporters will do whatever it takes to maintain the status quo,” Mason Tvert of the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) told Marijuana.com. “They recognize that the best chance they have to win the debate is to prevent it from taking place.”
In Arizona, for example, prohibitionists sued to block a legalization measure for which more than 258,000 people signed petitions. On Wednesday, the state Supreme Court ruled that the lawsuit from the group, Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, was without merit and that voters will in fact get a chance to decide whether the state enacts legalization.
Elsewhere, a group called Arkansans Against Legalizing Medical Marijuana has filed a lawsuit to prevent officials from counting the votes of of a medical cannabis measure that qualified for that state’s November ballot. The Arkansas Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the case, and a second measure on the same topic has since been certified for the ballot. It is unclear if opponents will file a lawsuit against that measure as well.
In Oklahoma, advocates collected enough signatures to qualify a medical cannabis initiative but are accusing state officials of gumming up the works in order to prevent the measure from getting over remaining procedural hurdles before ballots need to be printed.
The first sentence of state Attorney General Scott Pruitt’s draft ballot title says the proposal “legalizes the licensed use, sale and growth of marijuana in Oklahoma” without mentioning the fact that it only does so for people who have doctors’ recommendations for medical use. Advocates have vowed to challenge the language, a process which is likely to cause the measure to miss this year’s ballot. If so, it will be delayed until a special election or the 2018 midterms, when turnout dynamics aren’t likely to be as favorable to marijuana law reform as in a presidential election year.
In Missouri, medical marijuana advocates have sued to overturn a decision by state officials who say their campaign fell just shy of collecting enough signatures in a single Congressional district in order to qualify for the ballot. But they have also had to defend against a lawsuit filed by prosecutors who claim that the initiative is unconstitutional because it conflicts with federal law.
Michigan legalization activists are waiting for the state Supreme Court to decide whether signatures they collected in support of a measure they want to put on November’s ballot should be counted against the wishes of state officials.
Marijuana law reform campaigners in Maine had to sue state officials to count signatures in support of a legalization measure. They won, and the measure will appear before voters in November.
In Massachusetts, prohibitionists sued to block a marijuana legalization measure from appearing on the November ballot. The state Supreme Judicial Court disagreed.
It is unknown exactly how much money marijuana law reform advocates have had to spend waging court battles just so that voters get the chance to give the proposals an up or down decision at the ballot box. But it is reasonable to assume that, added together, litigation to protect the various state measures has cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars that could have otherwise paid for TV advertising or get-out-the-vote operations in support of the ballot measures.
Tvert, of MPP, said that the blocking tactics are nothing new, pointing to prohibitionist shenanigans in past election cycles.
