The Missouri Supreme Court last week denied an appeal that challenged a ballot initiative's certification to legalize recreational marijuana.
Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft (R) approved Legal Missouri 2022’s ballot Initiative 2022-059 after more than 400,000 signatures were collected. Only 180,000 valid signatures were needed to place the measure on November’s ballot.
However, Joy Sweeney challenged whether Ashcroft had the authority to disregard the decision of local election authorities to invalidate some of the signatures.
"Ms. Sweeney and her allies did not argue that those signatures were not valid,” said Dan Viets, a Columbia attorney who serves as the Missouri state coordinator for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). “They argued that the Secretary of State did not have the authority to overrule the local county clerks. The trial court in Cole County disagreed and the Western District Court of Appeals disagreed.”
Sweeney is the deputy director at the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America.
“In my view, they’re just an extreme anti-drug organization,” Viets told the St. Louis Record. “Somehow this litigation was supposedly being funded by a group in Colorado called Protect Our Kids. It’s an old theme to scare people into believing their kids are being endangered by marijuana. The irony is that marijuana use by teenagers in Colorado has dropped dramatically since legalization.”
Recreational marijuana was legalized in Colorado in 2014.
"We are still weighing our options and will let you know as soon as we possibly can," Sweeney told the St. Louis Record about plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Protect Our Kids did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
"We do believe that the majority of Missourians are going to support Amendment 3 and we look forward to ending the prohibition of responsible adult use of marijuana and also undoing a lot of the damage that marijuana prohibition has done by expunging hundreds of thousands of marijuana conviction records," Viets added.
In addition to mandating the automatic expungement of non-violent marijuana offenses, the ballot initiative will legalize the recreational purchase and use of 3 ounces of marijuana by adults at least 21 years old.
As previously reported in the St. Louis Record, state Rep. Ashley Bland Manlove (D-Jackson County) opposes Legal Missouri 2022 because it doesn't include equity provisions, and allegedly falls short of resolving cannabis criminalization racial disparities.