The Florida Supreme Court Won't Let Voters Legalize Recreational Marijuana [View all]
Source: Slate
On Thursday, the Florida Supreme Court—probably the most conservative state high court in the country–concluded that the state’s voters could not be trusted with a ballot initiative that would legalize recreational marijuana for adults. By a 5–2 vote, the court tossed out the initiative, denying Florida residents the opportunity to vote on it. To justify its action, the majority seized upon a dubious rationale: It asserted that the ballot summary implies that the initiative will somehow legalize marijuana under federal law, rendering it “affirmatively misleading.” Because of this putative defect, the court denied Floridians an opportunity to repeal state laws banning recreational weed.
The campaign to liberalize Florida’s marijuana laws has long pitted the people against state officials. For years, the Republicans in the state legislature and governor’s mansion refused to expand access to cannabis. In 2016, Floridians took the matter into their own hands, legalizing medical marijuana through a ballot initiative amending the state constitution that passed with more than 71 percent of the vote. Former Republican Gov. Rick Scott, abetted by GOP state legislators, attempted to gut this new law by strictly limiting qualifying conditions for the drug and banning smokable marijuana. A court blocked that ban, and the legislature eventually repealed it.
Seizing this momentum, cannabis reform advocates launched a new ballot initiative to legalize recreational marijuana for all adults over the age of 21. As of Thursday, the initiative’s sponsor had raised $8.2 million and collected more than 556,000 signatures out of the 891,589 needed to get on the ballot in 2022. Its strong support at this early date indicated a real possibility that the initiative would cross the 60 percent threshold necessary to amend the state constitution. But as its proponents were collecting signatures, Attorney General Ashley Moody, a Republican, asked the Florida Supreme Court to weigh in on the measure’s legality. Specifically, Moody asked if the language of the summary that would appear on ballots in 2022 was “misleading.”
In an unsigned opinion, a majority of the court held that the language was “misleading,” killing the entire initiative. The court took issue with a single word: “permits.” It noted that the ballot summary says the measure “permits” adults over 21 to buy, use, and possess marijuana for recreational purposes. But, the court pointed out, marijuana remains illegal under federal law. “The summary’s unqualified use of the word “permits” strongly suggests that the conduct to be authorized by the amendment will be free of any criminal or civil penalty in Florida,” the majority held. Yet “a constitutional amendment cannot unequivocally ‘permit’ or authorize conduct that is criminalized under federal law. And a ballot summary suggesting otherwise is affirmatively misleading.”
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/the-florida-supreme-court-won-t-let-voters-legalize-recreational-marijuana/ar-BB1fWDez?li=BB141NW3&ocid=DELLDHP
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