Ignore Ohio: Pot Legalization Is Inevitable
A well-funded initiative to legalize medical and recreational marijuana in Ohio lost 64 percent to 36 percent Tuesday, but legalization’s national prospects are much brighter than this trouncing implies.
In polls, more than 80 percent of voters in Ohio favor medical marijuana, and a small majority want to see it legalized for all adults. These numbers are roughly in line with national sentiment.
Tuesday’s lopsided vote reflects disgust with how the Ohio market would have been structured. Ten companies each donated $2 million to support the legalization campaign, known as Issue 3, and if it had passed the ten groups would have essentially been granted exclusive and indefinite permission to grow commercial marijuana in the state, a business estimated at $1 billion annually.
The pay-to-play arrangement was so off-putting that national pro-legalization groups like the Drug Policy Alliance and the Marijuana Policy Project declined to endorse it, despite the real and symbolic value of legal pot in the big Midwestern bellweather state. “The 19th-century robber barons couldn’t have dreamed up a more perfect plan,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer editorialized.
Unless the raft of states that could go green next year have similarly ill-conceived plans, the Ohio vote was likely an anomaly. Legalization advocates also prefer elections in presidential election years, when more young people bother to vote.
Views on legalization do not split neatly along party lines. The most pro-pot presidential candidates are Republican Rand Paul and Democrat Bernie Sanders. Of the candidates, the one who has been loudest in his opposition is Chris Christie, New Jersey’s Republican governor, a longshot to win the nomination.
“If you’re getting high in Colorado today, enjoy it,” Christie said in July. “As of January 2017, I will enforce the federal laws.” (Though four states and the District of Columbia have legalized recreational use, and 23 more allow some form of medical marijuana, the federal government’s official position is that marijuana is illegal and has no valid medical uses.) In an appearance on Face the Nation, John Dickerson suggested to Christie that a hardline stance on legalization isn’t smart politics. How, Dickerson asked, are you going to win in Colorado?
“I think there’s probably a lot of people in Colorado who are not too thrilled with what is going on there right now,” Christie said. “And you know the way you win any state? You go out and you tell people the truth and you lay out your ideas, and you either win or you lose.”
In fact, an April poll found that 62 percent of Colorado voters support legalization, 7 percent more than voted for it in 2012. And since only 18 percent of Coloradans said they had used marijuana since legalization, the experiment appears to enjoy considerable, though not quite majority, support among non-users as well.
Last year legal marijuana grossed $2.7 billion. Nationally, that’s not much, but the political dynamics at work will make it difficult to uproot. In Colorado, the industry directly employs thousands of people, and last year generated tens of millions in taxes. Enforcing federal marijuana laws would put people out of work and likely cut funding for school construction and other programs the taxes support. It would be an unusual way for a first-term president to suck up to a swing state. For a Republican, it would also violate the haloed principle of states’ rights. (Among the frontrunners from both parties, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio is probably the strongest opponent of legalization, though he’s not very vocal about it.)
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