Is Missouri ready for recreational marijuana? Voters could see petitions at the polls

With Missouri’s medical marijuana startup going about as well as the country’s faltering coronavirus fight, is now the time for the state to make the jump into recreational marijuana?

That’s for voters to decide, but they may get the chance much more quickly than they ever imagined: Even though medical marijuana isn’t yet for sale in the state, petitions are already making the rounds, especially at select polling places for Tuesday’s primary election, to put recreational or “adult use” marijuana on the November ballot.

The Star Editorial Board supports medical marijuana but has not yet weighed in on whether recreational marijuana should be approved. That’s a whole different animal with many unknown implications — and the crucial debate over it simply hasn’t taken place here.

Voters should approach signing petitions for recreational marijuana with all due caution for the same reason, and for others as well.

Dr. John C. Hagan III, an ophthalmologist and medical researcher in the Northland, is no fan of medical marijuana, and certainly advises hitting the brakes before approving recreational use. Also editor of Missouri Medicine medical journal, Hagan vigorously recommends studying the issue. His own research indicates societal side effects that include increased emergency room visits, more hazardous road traffic and fuller jails in such places as Colorado.

“When (Colorado) went to recreational marijuana, everything that was bad got much worse. Some of the physicians at North Kansas City Hospital have told me that they’re seeing an increase in the same sorts of problems under medical marijuana,” Hagan says of people jumping the gun on legal medical marijuana sales here. “We need to just stop and analyze what effect medical marijuana’s going to have without taking this next big leap that has not worked out well in Washington state or Colorado.”

Recreational cannabis supporters in Colorado had a fundraiser last month in Denver to support Missourians for a New Approach’s effort to legalize recreational marijuana in Missouri.

“They think Missouri will be a pushover because of the euphoria associated with medical marijuana,” Hagan says.

Missourians for a New Approach campaign manager John Payne counters that adult-use marijuana is about justice and economics: the injustice of criminalizing its use, and the economic activity and resulting tax revenues its legalization creates. People are flocking to Colorado, he says, precisely because of popular public policies such as this.

“Right now, Missouri is on the losing end of that. We’ve been kind of a stagnant state for quite a while, whereas Colorado has grown pretty rapidly and is likely to surpass the population of Missouri in the near future,” Payne says.

As for whether a decision to legalize recreational use is coming too soon, Payne argues, “Issues of justice don’t really have a timeline on them. They shouldn’t, anyway. It’s just not the right thing to do, to arrest people for possession of marijuana. We want to bring an end to those arrests here in Missouri.”

Regardless of your position on the issue, it’s wise to use caution in signing any petition these days. With petition-activated ballot initiatives available in various states, hiring paid canvassers to collect signatures has become a cottage industry. They are, essentially, paid lobbyists going straight to the people — not the civically active neighbors of yore pounding the pavement to improve their own communities.

There’s certainly nothing wrong or illegal in that, either. It’s just something voters need to be aware of and take into account.

Paid canvassing firm FieldWorks, which describes itself as “a nationally recognized grassroots organizing firm founded to help progressive organizations, advocacy groups, and members of the Democratic family take their public engagement and electoral strategies to the next level,” is on the ground collecting signatures to hold a November recreational marijuana vote in Missouri.

While no company can exert complete control over all its workers, such canvassing has seen controversies in recent years. Hundreds of “dubious” FieldWorks voter registration forms were flagged by officials in Ohio in 2012. The same year, Ohio police arrested a FieldWorks canvasser for allegedly forging 22 signatures on a petition. In 2016, suburban Philadelphia officials rejected 3,400 last-minute voter registration forms submitted by FieldWorks for being duplicates and having other problems.

While these are isolated incidents and certainly not an indictment of FieldWorks, they are cautionary tales for voters.

Payne said he’s unaware of past problems with the company’s petitioners, adding that they’ve worked in Missouri before without any problems. And, he says, many of the inevitable invalid signatures in such a ballot initiative are the result of honest mistakes by petition signers themselves, not the circulators.

Other than threatening them with misdemeanor fines and jail sentences for fraudulent signatures, there’s little that Missouri law can do to regulate what canvassers claim to voters about their petitions — or indeed what their petitions even say. There’s no obligation, for instance, to have the petition language on each page of signatures.

Missouri’s recreational marijuana campaign has about 200 petition canvassers across the state, who must collect certain portions of the 170,000 signatures required to get the issue on the ballot from six of the state’s eight congressional districts.

This is the pitched debate the state needs to have, and hasn’t had, before voting on recreational marijuana.

In short, signer beware.

This story was originally published March 10, 2020 at 5:00 AM.