Activists in Nebraska unveiled a new strategy this week in their effort to legalize medical marijuana through the ballot box next year, announcing that they’ll seek to qualify a pair of complementary initiatives to put before voters. The bifurcated approach is an effort to avoid running afoul of the state’s single-issue rule for citizen initiatives, a policy that led by the state Supreme Court last year to invalidate a medical cannabis legalization measure that had qualified for the 2020 general election. A separate effort in the legislature this session stalled when supporters failed to muster enough votes to overcome a GOP-led filibuster. In the aftermath, Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana said in June that the group was drafting multiple, complementary ballot initiatives in addition to an extremely short constitutional amendment that would simply declare people “in the state of Nebraska shall have the right to cannabis in all its forms for medical purposes.” But the group now tells the Lincoln Journal Star it will scrap that pared-down language in favor of two separate statutory initiatives that would “work in unison”: One would direct the legislature to pass a bill establishing legal protections for patients and doctors around cannabis, while the other would require lawmakers to pass legislation allowing private companies to produce and sell medical marijuana products.
Ben Adlin, Marijuana Moment, 08/09/2021 12:24:00