If you think the battle to legalize marijuana is all over bar the shouting, think again.
Marijuana prohibitionists have been counter-attacking effectively of late, and they’ve had some major successes.
Two weeks ago it looked like passage of legalization bills was imminent in the New Mexico and New Jersey legislatures.
It didn’t happen in either state. In New Mexico, a House-passed legalization bill was killed in the state Senate Judiciary Committee. It’s probably dead for the session.
In New Jersey, a legalization bill Democratic Governor Phil Murphy and the Democratic leadership in the state legislature had spent months haggling over was finally introduced in both houses of the legislature earlier this month — only to be abruptly pulled Monday, March 25, when it became clear that there weren’t enough votes to pass it in the state Senate. The measure had cleared the state Assembly Appropriations Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee last week.
According to Kyle Jaeger at Marijuana Moment, two different vote counts in the New Jersey Senate showed that as of Monday, 23 state senators, a majority, planned to vote no. One count showed only eight firm yes votes with nine uncommitted; the other showed 18 yes votes.
“History is rarely made on the first try,” said Murphy, who had made marijuana legalization a big part of his successful election campaign in 2017. “Certainly I’m disappointed but we are not defeated. We all remain committed to passing this bill and making our state a national model for justice and opportunity because ultimately this is the right thing to do for New Jersey, and we know the people of New Jersey are on our side.”
That’s putting a brave face on an embarrassing fail, but Kevin Sabet, president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), the country’s leading pot prohibitionist organization, may have had the more accurate take on what happened — he called the decision to pull the bill a “huge victory for us.”
“They told us legalization was inevitable, and this action proves them wrong,” he said in a press release.
So what went wrong?
For one thing, Murphy and the legislative leadership seems to have made an amateur’s mistake; they negotiated the legalization bill without involving most of the legislature’s rank-and-file members. Chances are this was resented by the members who were left out and had no ownership in the measure.
Beyond that, legislative politics are different than the sort of electoral politics that legalization organizations like the Marijuana Policy Project, NORML and the Drug Policy Alliance have successfully used to pass legalization ballot initiatives.
Those organizations have proved themselves adept at working precincts; Sabet’s side has a better understanding of how to practice the micro-politics of, uh, smoke-filled rooms.
This is troubling, because most future legalization battles will be fought out in state legislatures, not in initiative campaigns.
Pro-legalization forces better learn the art of lobbying and fast, or there could be several more defeats this year — starting with New York, where Governor Andrew Cuomo’s legalization bill is running into resistance. Passage of legalization measures in Connecticut and Rhode Island shouldn’t be taken for granted either.
There are two other things pro-legalization groups need to do. The first is to start engaging and challenging the prohibitionist narrative again. Guys like Sabet are still telling the same old lies, but there are a lot of people in government who haven’t heard them before, and if they are not answered they stick.
The other thing the legalization movement has to do is to start identifying the prohibitionist dead-enders in state legislatures and challenging them in both primaries and general elections. This means finding pro-legalization candidates, raising money, recruiting volunteers, organizing get-out-the-vote drives, and so on.
A poll taken in New Jersey last month found 62 percent of adults supported legalizing marijuana. With that sort of support it’s a near certainty that some of the anti-legalization hardliners in the state legislature can be knocked off if legalization supporters have the wit, will and tenacity to go after them.
