Ohio voters weigh weed legalization

Ohio voters appear poised to back recreational marijuana legalization on Tuesday, nearly a decade after they rejected a similar ballot measure.

Recent polls have found support for the question hovering around 60 percent, but in an off-year election where it’s uncertain who will show up at the polls the outcome is far from certain.

“The only poll that matters is next Tuesday,” said Tom Haren, spokesperson for the Coalition to Regulate Marijuana like Alcohol, which is leading the pro-legalization campaign.

If successful, the initiative will make Ohio the 24th state in the nation to legalize recreational weed. It will also add to the trend of more conservative states establishing adult-use markets, with voters in Montana and Missouri backing recreational legalization in recent years.

But in the run-up to Election Day, the opposition campaign is getting a boost from elected officials, with Republican Gov. Mike DeWine urging voters to reject the initiative.

“It favors certain people,” DeWine told NBC-affiliate WLWT. “People who already have a license to sell medical marijuana — it favors them over anybody else.”

Republican lawmakers are also broadly against the legalization proposal. In October, the Senate adopted a resolution opposing the initiative and urging a ‘No’ vote.

Abortion referendum spurs turnout

The timing of the vote has its pros and cons for legalization supporters: Running a ballot campaign in an odd-numbered year in a sprawling state like Ohio is significantly cheaper than a presidential election year.

But presidential elections tend to turn out younger voters.

The marijuana initiative is sharing the ballot with a referendum on abortion rights, which appears to be driving larger turnout in early voting.

Haren believes that, given broad public support for marijuana legalization, higher turnout — particularly among young voters — will help their campaign.

However, Scott Milburn, spokesperson for the anti-legalization group Protect Ohio Workers and Families, believes that the abortion question will help their campaign by drawing out voters who care about children and families, and he believes that those voters are likely to oppose the legalization measure.

Haren said the pro-legalization campaign has enough resources for its final push to reach voters through the mail, advertisements and on social media.

“We’ve been talking to Ohio voters for two years … [since] the first batch of signature collections in 2021,” he said. “We’ve been on their radar well in advance.”

An ad from the pro-legalization campaign spotlights the small Michigan town of Morenci, which has a population of about 2,000 and five cannabis dispensaries.

“Ohioans are flocking to Michigan to buy marijuana,” the ad says. “Michigan gets to keep all the tax revenue.”

An Ohio State University analysis estimates that taxing legal cannabis will generate similar revenues as Ohio’s casinos — about $300 million a year.

But anti-legalization advocates are cautioning against the lure of tax revenues.

“A third of [the tax revenue] goes back into the industry,” said Milburn.

Under the proposal, 36 percent of cannabis taxes go to a cannabis social equity and jobs fund, 36 percent to municipalities, 25 percent to a substance abuse treatment fund and 3 percent to state administrative costs.

Opponents like Milburn point to public health concerns like adolescent brain development and accidental ingestion that could prove costly for the state in the long run.

“Do they even cover the cost of the problems they create?” Milburn said. “This is certainly no big windfall to the state.”

Like recent campaigns in red states like Missouri and Arkansas, anti-legalization advocates are making a distinction between the concept of marijuana legalization and proposals that they argue are written to mainly benefit big corporations that simply want to sell as much weed to as many people as possible. And even pro-marijuana advocates have made those arguments in hopes of heading off cannabis programs where a handful of big companies dominate.

“The concept of legalization certainly has strong support in Ohio,” Milburn said. “However, when people learn [that]… Issue 2 is very self serving of the industry, the support falls [to the] mid-40s,” he said, citing internal polling.

That’s an argument that could resonate with Ohio voters. In 2015, an Ohio campaign to legalize adult-use was rejected by voters due in part to concerns that the proposal would essentially hand over the market to the campaign’s 10 wealthy donors.

While Ohio's pro-legalization campaign’s largest donor is Marijuana Policy Project, a national advocacy group, other donors include industry interests like Cresco Labs and Curaleaf.

The pro-legalization campaign has raised more than $6.2 million since 2021, and has spent about $5.2 million, according to the latest campaign finance data. Meanwhile, the opposition campaign has raised less than half a million dollars since August and spent about $230,000.

“This isn’t my first rodeo,” Milburn said. “We know what happens when you’re [vastly] outspent.”

A lift for businesses

Ohio has remained a bright spot in a cannabis industry that has seen a lot of volatility in recent years.

Sales hit $1.5 billion in October since the medical market launched in 2019. There are nearly 400,000 registered patients in the program, and about half of them are active.

“We’ll take any wins we can get in these states,” said James Leventis, executive vice president of government affairs at Verano Holdings, one of the operators in Ohio’s medical market.

While Verano didn't contribute to the campaign, legalization would have “a huge boost to our bottom line.”

The passage of the initiative could be a financial boon for smaller operators as well.

“Only two percent of the population holds a medical marijuana card,” said Ariane Kirkpatrick, CEO of Mavuno, previously known as Harvest.

Access to adult-use marijuana would bring in additional customers like her cousin who suffers from chronic pain due to arthritis. Despite qualifying for the medical marijuana program, Kirkpatrick says, her cousin’s doctor is against using medical cannabis and that’s kept her from using the product.

One thing industry officials and legalization advocates are worried about, however, is that the Legislature could change the language after voters pass it.

“We’re staying very active in the political sphere on monitoring that, on trying to guide what that language might be,” Levantis said.

Kirkpatrick will be looking to protect a provision that sets aside 36 percent of cannabis tax revenues to the cannabis social equity and jobs fund.

When Kirkpatrick first got into the industry, Ohio had a minority licensing program that was eventually struck down by the courts.

“I’m going to make sure there are intentional and impactful social equity programs,” she said.

It’s that very provision that Republican state Senate President Matt Huffman expressed interest in revisiting if the referendum passes, the Statehouse News Bureau reported.

Huffman opposes legalization, but said he would not seek to repeal the initiative. Instead, he told reporters that he would “advocate for reviewing it and repealing things or changing things that are in it.”

A lengthy legislative battle over amendments could upend the timeline spelled out in the initiative, which has sales starting by the end of 2024.

A long gap between legalization and the launch of legal sales “just invites the illicit market to come in and take over, and you lose long-term tax revenue,” said Leventis.

But for right now, “we’re focused on Election Day,” Haren said. “We’ll see what kind of nonsense some people might try in the Legislature afterwards.”