Marijuana legalization makes gains but faces strong red-state pushback

Nationwide efforts to legalize marijuana appear to have a ways to go after U.S. voters handed them a split decision in Tuesday’s midterms, approving recreational pot in two states while rejecting it in three others.

Advocates cheered the ballot wins in Missouri and Maryland, which they say underline the growing support for the national legalization movement, while also downplaying losses in the more conservative states of Arkansas, North Dakota and South Dakota.

“We have seen, in the last decade, nearly half the country go from having no legal marijuana to having legal marijuana,” Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said on Wednesday, insisting the defeats on Tuesday mean “very little.”

Armentano also pointed to the timing of the ballot measures coming up in a non-presidential election year, when he noted voter turnout tends to be lower, specifically pointing to South Dakota, which voted in the opposite direction two years ago.

“South Dakota passed a more progressive and expansive legalization law in the 2020 presidential election, only to have that election result nullified by legal actions that were instigated by the Republican governor of that state,” Armentano said.

Experts say that, while marijuana is becoming a less partisan issue in the country, only a fraction of the states that have legalized recreational marijuana so far have been Republican-led.

“While there is relatively bipartisan support for marijuana, especially compared to a lot of other contentious issues, there’s more support among both Democratic voters and Democratic policymakers,” said Richard C. Auxier, a senior policy associate in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

“Cannabis is still popular; it’s still going to expand, but there are limits,” Auxier said.

A decade has passed since voters in Colorado and Washington first approved measures legalizing weed for recreational use, and, since then, more than a dozen states and Washington, D.C., have followed that lead.

But only a small fraction of those states are red-leaning, despite growing support seen among even Republicans in recent years.

A Monmouth University survey from last month found that 68 percent of Americans support legalizing at least a small amount of pot for personal use, including 76 percent of Democrats, 73 percent of independents and 52 percent of Republicans.

Since 2012, the nation has seen states legalize recreational marijuana on nearly a biannual basis, with Democratic-leaning states largely leading the charge.

But not all experts expect that pace to keep up.

John Hudak, deputy director of the Center for Effective Public Management and a senior fellow in Governance Studies, said the rate “is going to slow as you begin to run into more socially conservative states,” pointing out that “there aren’t as many blue states left to legalize.”

Auxier told The Hill, “We’re getting to a point where it’s getting more challenging for these to pass. But that’s almost marijuana being a victim of its own success, because it’s passing in states that either voted for [President] Biden or that were more kind of more partisan split.”

Most of the states that have legalized in recent years have also done so through ballot initiatives, which advocates note are not likely to be the case for most of the remaining ones, requiring action from legislators.

Advocates and experts also acknowledged other hurdles that stood in the way of passage for the ballot measures this week, including opposition campaigns tying legalization to crime they say have been effective in red states.

“Here in South Dakota, our opponents have tried to use the issue of crime against us,” Matthew Schweich, deputy director of the Marijuana Policy Project, told The Hill, adding that elected sheriffs “have come out against us, and they campaign in uniform.”

Hudak said the Arkansas ballot measure also “was just a bad initiative from a public policy perspective,” taking aim at language he said “determined who would be licensed and how many licenses there would be.”

Missouri’s ballot measure also became a source of contention for some advocates due to portions that dealt with licensing. Advocates pushing back against the language, which some said only allowed microbusinesses to interact with one another, called the proposal unfair.

Kaliko Castille, president of the board of directors for the Minority Cannabis Business Association, came out against the provision. Castille said he thinks the thought process behind the plan was to create “an ecosystem of small businesses doing business with each other, and that’s somehow going to grow.”

“But you’re kind of arbitrarily tying the hands of Black and Brown business owners,” Castille added.

Calls have been building for those leading legalization efforts to focus on racial equity, not only when it comes to arrests but also in business as the cannabis industry gains a stronger foothold in the nation.

Data released by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2020 found that Black Americans were more than three times as likely to be arrested for marijuana offenses than their white counterparts.

And the numbers show that Black Americans are underrepresented in the country’s growing cannabis industry. A 2021 report from Leafly found that Black Americans accounted for only 1.2 percent to 1.7 percent of all cannabis company owners, despite making up about 12 percent of the country’s population.

“It ultimately comes down to the fact that prohibition was set up specifically as a targeted policy to help keep Black and Brown communities to help keep them down and keep them in social control,” Castille said. “And so I think the idea that you’re going to be able to just pass sort of legalization laws, and it’s naturally going to correct itself just isn’t the case.”

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