Marijuana Legalization Continues To Move Forward

In November, Michigan voters will be able to make their state the tenth state to legalize marijuana. This is just the latest step in what seems to be an irreversible trend.

In the latest sign that the push to legalize marijuana is becoming more and more mainstream, CBS News reports that Michigan voters will get a chance to vote on marijuana legalization in November:

Voters in Michigan will head to the polls in November to cast their vote on legalizing recreational marijuana. If the measure is approved, Michigan will become the 10th state to legalize the use of recreational marijuana for adult use.

(…)

“The legislature could have acted to pass it immediately before it went on the ballot, but they just couldn’t get the support for it,” Kathy Gray, a political reporter for the Detroit Free Press, told CBS News. “We’ve got a Republican-controlled legislature and a Republican governor, and they just couldn’t get the votes to pass it before it got to the ballot.

Gray also said that the issue had the potential to increase turnout at the polls, but warned that opponents of the measure would not hesitate to take steps to prevent the measure from succeeding.

“I think that there will be a well-funded opposition campaign before we get into November,” said Gray.

The issue of the extent to which turnout in Michigan could be impacted by the presences of the legalization initiative on the ballot is important due to the fact that there were will be several statewide officers on the ballot that could be impacted by who turns out to vote on Election Day. Most importantly perhaps is the fact that the state will be electing a new Governor and Lt. Governor, a new Attorney General, and holding statewide legislative elections, there will also be a Senate Election in which Senator Debbie Stabenow will be seeking her fourth term in office. The Governor’s race is wide open since Rick Snyder, who was first elected in 2010 during the Republican wave election, is term-limited, and the state’s Republican Attorney General is running for the Republican nomination for Governor so that seat is open as well. If the marijuana initiative brings people to the polls, it could go a long way toward determining if Republicans hold onto these seats as well as the state legislature. As for the Senate race, Stabenow seems to be on a clear path to re-election regardless of who her Republican opponent is, with the Cook Political Report, Rothenberg Report, and Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball all listing the state as either “likely” or “solidly” Democratic.

The news about the ballot initiative in Michigan came the day after Vermont officially became the ninth state to legalize marijuana:

Recreational marijuana became legal in Vermont on Sunday as a bill authorizing its use went into effect. The state was the first to legalize the recreational use of the substance by an act of a state legislature, and the law allows adults to possess up to 1 ounce of marijuana, two mature and four immature plants.

Vermont became the ninth state in the country, along with Washington, D.C, to allow the recreational use of marijuana. The other states and Washington authorized the recreational use of marijuana through a vote of residents. Vermont law contains no mechanism that allows for a citizen referendum.

Gov. Phil Scott signed the bill into law in private with “mixed emotions” in January. In 2017 he vetoed an earlier version of the law, citing practical concerns. Both chambers of the state legislature passed the revised version in January.

The law contains no mechanism for the taxation or sale of marijuana, although the Legislature is expected to develop such a system.

(…)

Vermont residents held celebrations on Sunday to mark the beginning of legalization, CBS affiliate WCAX-TV reported. Heady Vermont, a group that advocates for legalization, hosted a celebration in Johnson, Vermont, on private property.

“It’s not smoking weed as much as is celebrating our ability to be able to do that, our ability to grow these plants, and more importantly the professionals to come out with open conversations and move away from the stigma,” Keith Morris, owner of the farm where the event was held, told WCAX.

All of this comes at a time when support for legalization seems to be reaching something like the steamroller that saw same-sex marriage quickly become legal across the United States during the earlier part of this decade. The most recent poll on the issue, for example, showed that nearly two-thirds of Americans support marijuana legalization, the latest high in a series of polls that stretch back to the early 2010s which clearly indicate that the American people are quickly becoming more acceptive of legal recreational marijuana. This support now stretches across all demographic groups, including Republicans, conservatives, and older voters who tend to be more conservative on social issues than younger voters. While it’s entirely possible that support could dip at some point in the future, the more likely outcome is that public support for legalization will only continue to grow in the years to come.

As public support for legalization has increased, the movement toward liberalizing the laws regulating marijuana, including outright legalization, has also moved steadily forward. It all started, of course, in 2010 when Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize cannabis for recreational use through citizen initiatives on the November ballot that year. Four years later, there were similar referenda passed in Oregon, Alaska, and the District of Columbia. In 2016 the movement gained even more steam thanks to the passage of legalization ballot measures in California, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Maine while voters in a number of other states approved legalization for medicinal purposes. 2018 has seen similar progress on this issue at the state level. For example, January was the biggest month yet for the legalization movement given the fact that the most populated state in the nation, California, officially legalized marijuana based on the 2016 referendum. Additionally, it appears as though New Jersey will soon join Vermont in becoming the second state to legalize marijuana through the legislature. More recently, former Speaker of the House John Boehner has announced that he’s changed his mind on the issue of legalization and joined the board of a company that grows and sells cannabis in states where it is legal for either medical or recreational purposes. Meanwhile, in Congress, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced a bill that would give states freedom to set their own marijuana laws free from Federal control and to protect the citizens of those states from being charged with Federal crimes if they are acting in accordance with state law.

Furthermore, as this map from Wikipedia shows, the laws regarding marijuana have been liberalized to at least some extent in virtually every state in the country:

As I’ve said before, all of this mirrors the manner in which we’ve seen another recent change in social attitudes have an impact on the law:

[T]here are unmistakable similarities between the tend that we’ve seen in polling on this issue and the trend that we saw in the polling on the issue of marriage equality in the years before the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.In both cases, the change seems to be rooted in changes in society and culture that have recognized that previous attitudes were based on incomplete information or biases that had no basis in fact. In some sense, the change in public opinion on marijuana legalization has been even more radical than the changes we saw with respect to marriage equality in that it has occurred over a much shorter period of time. The noticeable difference, of course, is that this increase in support for legalization has not led to the same rapid changes in the law that we saw with the marriage equality issue. To a large degree, though, this is because most of the progress with regard to same-sex marriage was made via the Court system rather than the legislative process or citizen referendums. For many reasons, the court system is not well suited to deal with the marijuana legalization, though, and the efforts that have been made have been largely unsuccessful. For example, last year a group of Plaintiffs in New York attempted to get a Federal Court to declare the scheduling of marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug by the Drug Enforcement Administration invalid, but that effort was dismissed. Instead, the progress on marijuana legalization has had to take the slower route of using the legislative and political process to change the law. Those routes generally operate at a  much slower pace than the court system does, and often be blocked by a determined minority of voters. Despite this slower pace, though, the trend toward more liberal marijuana laws and eventually nationwide legalization, seems to be fairly clear. At this point, it’s not a matter of if, but when.

These latest developments are just another step down that road.

 

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Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. HarvardLaw92 says:

    I continue to hope this will pass – and hopefully as a result rid my FB feed of stoners trying to convince people that pot cures everything from psoriasis to nail fungus in the process.

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  2. Kathy says:

    I wish things would just speed up and all drugs were legalized. That would pout an end to the pointless “war on drugs,” which would free up resources for more important things, like actual crimes that actually impact actual victims.

    We know eventually all or most will be legal. It’s only a matter of time.

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  3. Michael Reynolds says:

    @HarvardLaw92:
    I used to frequent a place called The Apothecarium in SF. I was invariably the sickest-looking person there – I’m bald and who knows, it could be chemo, right? Which means that either weed is amazingly effective at creating health, or we had all just managed to bullshit one of the tame pot doctors.

    I’m glad to see legalization. That it was the only logical course has been absolutely clear for about 50 years now, during which time families were destroyed, people harassed, cops militarized and prisons swelled all for no goddamn reason whatsoever.

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  4. HarvardLaw92 says:

    @Michael Reynolds:

    Oh I agree. I don’t partake, but even from my non-user perspective it was silly to ever have criminalized it in the first place. Doing so pointlessly and needlessly destroyed lives. Far too many lives.

    Legalization would put a stop to that – and put a stop to my having to say “No, Susan. Pot doesn’t cure nail fungus. If you want to blaze, then blaze for chrissakes, but enough with the tortured rationalizations” all the time. 🙂

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  5. James Joyner says:

    @Michael Reynolds: @HarvardLaw92: My dad was, for a couple years in the late 1970s, a narc for the Army (a CID agent), so it never really occurred to me to partake. Plus, I’ve held security clearances at various points in my life and being caught using would be a career-ender. Still, considering the percentage of national security professionals who are functional alcoholics, I’m not sure we wouldn’t be better off if everyone was toking instead.

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  6. teve tory says:

    If it’s true what idiot Jeff Sessions said, “Good people don’t smoke marijuana”, then most of the people I met in Washington State were not good people. They just tricked me by being friendly, laid back, helpful, kind, and generous.

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  7. teve tory says:

    @HarvardLaw92:

    and hopefully as a result rid my FB feed of stoners trying to convince people that pot cures everything from psoriasis to nail fungus in the process.

    It’s when they’re talking about hemp as a Miracle Product that they’re the worst. 😛

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  8. teve tory says:

    @James Joyner: If I were dictator I’d make booze expensive and weed available at cost. Speaking as an alcoholic who almost destroyed his life multiple times, pot is virtually harmless. Alcohol is worse than anything else, and i’m including heroin and crack.

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  9. Michael Reynolds says:

    @teve tory:
    Pot has the great advantage of being self-limiting: you can only get so high and there is no lethal dose. Alcohol – as you know – can absolutely kill you right away, or kill you slowly, or cause you to kill someone else, or cause you to wish you were dead. Dangerous stuff.

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  10. teve tory says:

    @Michael Reynolds: I tried to look up the LD50 of pot. I couldn’t find it. Nobody’s sure it’s ever happened, according to the brief, lazy search I did.

  11. teve tory says:

    A friend of mine OD’d on pot. He made cannabutter and miscalculated and made a dose 10 times stronger than he thought he’d estimated (he was a musician, not a scientist 😛 ). Know what happened? He sat on the couch, catatonic, for about 8 straight hours. And then was fine.

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  12. JohnMcC says:

    @teve tory: Tell your friend that if he has dogs the edible cannabis can actually be dangerous. To his dogs.

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  13. An Interested Party says:

    If it’s true what idiot Jeff Sessions said, “Good people don’t smoke marijuana”…

    Really good people don’t lock up children up in cages and then use the bible to justify such actions…

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  14. Kathy says:

    @JohnMcC:

    Tell your friend that if he has dogs the edible cannabis can actually be dangerous. To his dogs.

    So can edible chocolate.

  15. Matt says:

    @teve tory: Well there’s only so many receptors in your brain. Once those are full any extra THC is wasted. While edibles can take up to two hours for the full effect I’ve never heard of anyone experiencing 8 hours of high from one dose (that’s amazing). Longest I’ve experienced was a bit over 6 hours and that was a huge dose spread over hours. The cookies were too damned good and every half hour or hour I would have “just one more” “because it won’t hurt”. 8 cookies later and many hours afterwards I actually felt kind of sick in my stomach/body. The good news is that experience taught me to be strict on how many I eat. Although if that had been alcohol I would of been dead….

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  16. Guarneri says:

    Clearly you guys need to be sent to re-education camps and shown Reefer Madness Clockwork Orange-style………….