Dive Brief:
- Ohio voters said no (65% opposed) to a ballot that would have legalized medical and recreational marijuana and allowed adults over age 21 to use, buy, or grow specific amounts of marijuana and others to use it medicinally.
- However, growing facilities were limited to 10 pre-determined farms controlled by private investors, raising a great deal of controversy with opponents labeling it a "marijuana monopoly," as reported by the Washington Post.
- Ohio lawmakers wrote a competing initiative that passed, which explicitly outlawed voter-approved monopolies and oligopolies such as the one the legalization measure would have created.
Dive Insight:
The owners of the ten growing facilities are a group of 24 investors, including former NBA star Oscar Robertson and former boy band celebirty Nick Lachey. The group was reportedly asked to invest between $2 million and $4 million to back the referendum, the ResponsibleOhio campaign stated, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Recreational marijuana has been approved in four states (Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington) and the District of Columbia, with medical marijuana legal in almost half the states. Ohio would have been the first conservative Midwestern state to legalize pot, and also the first state to approve both forms of use at the same time. However, voters were turned off with the idea of an investment group "paying to run a campaign to pass a constitutional amendment that will make them very rich," reported the Los Angeles Times.
It was also problematic for national advocacy groups such as the Drug Policy Alliance and the Marijuana Policy Project, both of which refrained from endorsing the Ohio bill. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and Law Enforcement Officers Against Prohibition gave it a lukewarm, last minute endorsement.
Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance told the Washington Post, "What was most offensive about [the Ohio measure] was that they wanted to make it a constitutionally mandated oligopoly in perpetuity. It's clearly the case that the oligopoly provision turned people off."
The Washington Post stated the measure's defeat is "good news for people on both sides of the legalization debate worried about the co-option of the legalization debate by corporate interests -- the threat of "'Big Marijuana.'"