Activists: Mass. marijuana legalization not to be affected by Ohio failure
With at least five states -- Massachusetts possibly among them -- expected to vote on proposals to legalize, regulate and tax marijuana for recreational use next year, activists said the failure of a legalization ballot question in Ohio will have "no bearing" on the outcome on future legalization efforts.
By nearly a two-to-one vote Tuesday, Ohio voters turned down Issue 3, which would have legalized the limited use of marijuana for medical and recreational use in the Buckeye State.
The Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates for the end of marijuana prohibition, said what sunk the Ohio initiative was "wildly unpopular 'monopoly' language" that would have given 10 facilities exclusive commercial rights to grow marijuana. Ballot questions that are likely to go to voters next year in Massachusetts, Maine, Nevada, Arizona, and California do not include the so-called monopoly language, MPP said.
"It’s pretty obvious that the outcome in Ohio does not reflect where the nation stands or the direction in which it is heading when it comes to marijuana policy," MPP spokesman Mason Tvert said in a statement. "When voters in Nevada or Massachusetts get to the ballot box one year from now, they are not going to be thinking about what happened in Ohio a year earlier. They are going to be thinking about the problems marijuana prohibition has caused their states for so many years."
Two Massachusetts marijuana legalization groups -- Bay State Repeal and the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol -- have been approved by the attorney general's office to gather the signatures necessary to secure a spot on the 2016 ballot. Signatures must be filed with local voter registrars by Nov. 18 and initiative petition sponsors must have at least 64,750 certified voter signatures to keep their proposal in play for next year's ballot.
The questions expected to make the ballot next year, Tvert said, are also expected to benefit from the higher voter turnout associated with a presidential election.
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