Thoughts About Florida’s Failed Medical Marijuana Ballot Initiative

The war on drugs has been an abject failure, and society would benefit enormously by legalizing marijuana. I was thus very disappointed that the small step of legalizing medical marijuana failed to pass on a Florida ballot initiative last Tuesday.

1. The Game Is Rigged

Despite the fact that over 57% of voters approved legalizing medical marijuana, the initiative failed since a supermajority of 60% is required for constitutional amendments to become law in Florida. This is just absurd - the entire premise of democracy and voting is that the side with the most votes wins. Supermajority rules run contrary to that, and vastly favor the status quo, which in this case is awful. Furthermore up until 2006 ballot initiatives in Florida only needed a majority vote to get enacted into law. Then, a proposition funded by big business organizations in 2006 passed upping that threshold to 60%. Ironically, this also got 57% of the vote, less than the 60% that all future amendments require. To top it off, Florida has now elected a governor twice in a row with less than half the vote. All of these things signal to the average person that the game is rigged. Rick Scott can win with less than half the vote, but medical marijuana loses with more than half? How is that fair?

2. Money In Politics Is A Problem

Support for medical marijuana was actually polling at 88% approval in July of this year, and yet by election day this was down by 31 points to just 57%. What happened in the interveining months was Sheldon Adelson pumping in a few million dollars in television ads against the amendment. It seems that in order for Adelson to buy influence with the Governor (he has plans to build a casino in the state), he choose to accomplish this by destroying a good piece of public policy. We need to get money out of politics for a lot of reasons. We can now add preventing moronic Billionaires from perpetuating the failed war on drugs to the list.

3. Partisanship Can Be Poisonous

A big part of the reason that Adelson thought funneling money into defeating this ballot initiative would curry favor with the Governor is due to partisanship. Specifically, the funers and organizers of the ballot initiative had very close ties to Charlie Crist, the democratic candidate for Governor. Some republicans then thought that that the ballot initiative was a sneaky plan to support Charlie Crist by boosting voter turn out, and turned against it. It is absolutely insane to undermine popular and good public policy due to a perception that you will gain a short term political advantage. This kind of behavior of putting party over country and engaging in political shenanigans really turns people off from participating in the political system.

4. (Young) People Are Disengaged

Only 43.1% of eligible Florida voters^[1] actually voted on election day. The country as a whole expierenced the lowest mid-term election turn out in 72 years. If more people voted, specifically younger people who in that same July poll favored legalizing medical marijuana 95-5, a full 21 points higher than senior citizens, the initiative could have passed. Instead you had old people making up 3 times the share of the electorate as young people. When young people don't show up on election day, the future loses.

5. Change Is Hard, But We Will Get There

As disappointing as this loss is, the future looks bright. The same night that this medical marijuana initiative failed in Florida, residents of Oregon, Alaska, and DC voted to legalize recreational marijuana outright.

It's really frustrating to wait for people and politicians to evolve on this issue. But in the grand scheme of things, this evolution is happening fairly fast. It's been only 18 years since California passed the nation's first medical marijuana inititive in 1996. We now have 23 states with legal medical marijuana, including 4 states (plus DC) where recreational marijuana is legal. A majority of the country favors full marijuana legalization - a drastic change from just 10 years ago.

Just today NYC announced that they wil stop arresting people for marijuana, and instead just issue tickets. The FDA is currently considering whether to reclassify marijuana lower than a class 1 drug, which in one fell swoop could solve this issue outright. In 2016 Califorina will most likely legalize marijuana.

We as a country will have fully legal marijuana soon enough. As hard as it is to make progress on a big issue like this, it's worth fighting for.

^{1. 10% of Florida residents are ineligible to vote because Florida bans felons from voting. It's doubly cruel to incarcerate people for drugs, then prevent them from peacefully voting on sound drug policy for the rest of their lives. source ↩}