It’s no secret: most Americans believe cannabis should be legal.
Today, 17 states have legalized adult-use, meaning more than 40% of Americans now live in a state where marijuana is allowed for those over 21. More than 30 states allow some kind of medical marijuana access, which leaves only two that have not amended their marijuana laws at all—Idaho and Nebraska.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has promised that he and Senators Cory Booker and Ron Wyden will introduce their cannabis legalization bill, but he hasn’t issued a timeline.
Despite the overwhelming support from Americans to legalize marijuana, prohibition is stubborn. And in a handful of states, elected leaders are doing their best to preserve cannabis prohibition.
Paul Armentano, the deputy director of NORML, says Americans should be concerned by what he calls “overtly undemocratic tactics” that some Republican lawmakers have used against voter-approved cannabis ballot initiatives.
“Consistently, when it comes to measures specific to reforming marijuana laws, Republican leaders are seeking to either overturn a decision of the majority of their electorate, prevent them from voting on the issue altogether, or they are asking the Courts to nullify an election outcome,” says Armentano.
Weed is more popular than Donald Trump in Mississippi, but that didn’t stop the State Supreme Court from overturning the results of the medical marijuana ballot initiative that 73% of Mississippians approved during the November election. (About 58% of Mississippians voted for Trump.)
Earlier this month, the Magnolia State’s Supreme Court overturned Initiative 65, which would’ve launched a medical market in August, citing a technicality. The Court took up a lawsuit filed by the Republican mayor of Madison that argued the initiative is invalid because the signatures gathered did not meet the standards set in the state constitution. The legislature’s guidelines for petitioners requires an equal percentage of signatures from five congressional districts but, after the 2000 Census, Mississippi lost a congressional district and the statute’s language had not been updated.
“Whether with intent, by oversight, or for some other reason, the drafters of section 273(3) wrote a ballot-initiative process that cannot work in a world where Mississippi has fewer than five representatives in Congress,” Justice Josiah Coleman wrote for the majority ruling.
Ken Newburger, the executive director of the Mississippi Medical Marijuana Association, says he’s heartbroken that the ballot initiative that was overturned. He believes the legislature will eventually pass medical marijuana, but it’s not clear there are enough lawmakers who would vote yes.
“Prohibition is hard to get rid of,” he says. “I think there are some people in power who are against cannabis….”
Mayor Mary Hawkins Butler, who filed the suit, did not respond to requests for comment. Governor Tate Reeves, who said he was against Initiative 65 two days before the election, also did not respond to requests for comment.
In South Dakota, voters could have their approved ballot initiative that legalized adult-use cannabis nullified. On Election Day 2020, 54% of voters approved Amendment A. But later that month, South Dakota’s Republican Governor Kristi Noem directed a sheriff and superintendent of the South Dakota Highway Patrol to file a lawsuit in hopes to overturn the vote by claiming the initiative’s language violated the state’s single subject rule. The South Dakota Supreme Court has yet to make a final decision on the case.
Last September in Nebraska, a petition for medical marijuana received enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, but the state Supreme Court ruled that it wasn’t eligible due to a technicality. During a press conference in March, Nebraska’s Republican Governor Pete Ricketts warned: “If you legalize marijuana, you’re going to kill your kids.”
John Fetterman, the 6-foot-8, tattooed Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania who is running for Senate, says the “conservative freak out” around legalizing marijuana in some states reminds him of the last couple of years before the Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage legal in 2015.
“It’s the same kind of nuts who were saying, ‘Over my dead body gay marriage,’” says Fetterman. “We have gay marriage and the world didn’t spin off its axis.”
While mayor of the small town of Braddock, Fetterman officiated more than two dozen same-sex marriages before the governor threatened legal action in 2013. At that time, just two years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment applies to two people of the same sex, 17 states had legalized gay marriage, the same number of states that currently allow for adult-use marijuana today.
“I’m not equivocating a fundamental civil right like marriage, but I also think there’s an element similar to how shocking marriage equality was for some people,” says Fetterman. “It’s no one’s business who you love, that’s the point of it. And there are parallels to legal weed. You’ll always have some asshole who won’t bake a cake for a gay couple, or someone who will talk about Reefer Madness, but most people are saying: ‘Why aren’t we here? Why are we still talking about this?’”
In Pennsylvania, where medical marijuana has been legal since 2016, adult-use still has strong headwinds as the Republican legislators in control of the House and Senate, House Speaker Bryan Cutler and Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman, do not support it.
Fetterman believes that if you can buy as much grain alcohol as you want and smoke as many cigarettes as you’d like, you should be able to buy some weed without risking arrest.
“It’s a bizarre dislocation of logic and integrity there,” he says. “I think it’s the same kind wing nuts in Footloose who wanted to ban dancing. It has that same flavor.”
Armentano believes the methods some elected officials have used to block ballot initiatives are more sinister than how Rev. Shaw Moore convinced the town of Bomont to ban dancing.
Besides Mississippi, South Dakota, and Nebraska, Armentano points to Florida, where the State Supreme Court invalidated a proposed ballot measure to legalize adult-use in April, claiming the language was confusing to voters because it did not spell out that marijuana would still be illegal under federal law. (Florida legalized medical marijuana in 2014.)
“I think there has been a realization that if this issue goes to the ballot, the initiatives win. And once they go into law, they stay law, they can’t be repealed,” he says. “Accepting that reality, [Republican leaders] pivoted their strategy. What do you do if you can’t win at the ballot box? You do everything you can to not allow it on the ballot.”
If it gets on the ballot and is approved, “you get that vote nullified before the law takes effect,” he says.
Armentano says what’s most concerning is the idea that politics is a sport with winners and losers. “It isn’t about wins or loses,” he says. “The majority of voters voted for something and didn’t get it,” he says. “That’s not how things are supposed to work.”
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