In early November, Florida’s 14 million voters will make their views known on various issues, from who should be president to who should be dog catcher. One measure on the ballot may be more important than voters realize: whether to legalize marijuana.
If passed, Amendment 3 would permit Floridians aged 21 and up to possess and use marijuana, and allow the state’s “medical marijuana” dispensaries to become recreational retailers. Passage would make Florida the largest red state to embrace legal weed to date, reinforcing proponents’ view that pot can win beyond deep-blue America. It would also make Florida the 25th state to permit recreational use, a potentially pivotal tipping point in the state-by-state war for legalization.
The measure’s opponents, including Florida governor Ron DeSantis, have pulled out all the stops in fighting it, speaking out against Amendment 3 and putting one of DeSantis’s top aides in charge of the campaign against it. And recent polling suggests that it could fall short of the required 60 percent threshold in November. But weed foes are up against a well-funded campaign: the measure’s leading backer, $2 billion pot company Trulieve, has poured in more than $4 for every $1 spent by opponents.
For over a decade, full marijuana legalization has felt inevitable. But recent victories in other states and national polling suggest otherwise. Floridians may think the pot juggernaut is unstoppable, but they have a real chance to stop it.
Before casting their ballots, Floridians should consider the effects of legalization. Letting the state’s nearly 700 medical marijuana dispensaries run recreational sales will help prevent a black market, such as those in slow-moving states like New York, from forming. But a robust legal market will also encourage a race-to-the-bottom for prices and potency, as sellers—no longer constrained by state-level-prohibition—compete to sell a cheap-to-grow product to compulsive consumers.
At the individual level, that will mean more Floridians using pot. For many, it will be harmless fun. For some, though, it will mean more impaired driving, more respiratory issues, and more heart disease. For kids, it will mean more hospital visits, even if just from a poorly labeled gummy, and more psychosis—leading, for some, to schizophrenia. More than anything, legalization will mean more addiction, for adults and adolescents alike.
But marijuana won’t just make some Floridians worse off—it will make Florida worse off, too. Recent research from the Kansas City branch of the Federal Reserve finds that legalization yields small benefits for economies. Those benefits are paid for by large social costs: sizable increases in addiction, chronic homelessness, and arrests. Add to those the smaller harms of living in a society where more people—the store clerk, the factory worker, the school bus driver—are stoned.
Why, then, are Floridians even considering Amendment 3? The obvious answer is that most people don’t follow ballot measures closely, and those that do are being surrounded by a well-funded disinformation campaign run by the initiative’s proponents. Trulieve, has spent $60 million on getting the measure passed. This is the same company responsible for the death of a 27-year-old worker in one of its facilities in Massachusetts, and which got special favors from a Florida state legislator to help secure dominance in the state’s medical market. Remarkably, Trulieve and its supporters seem to think they have the moral high ground.
Perhaps for many Floridians, legal weed seems like a fait accompli. Maybe personally they don’t like pot and wouldn’t want a dispensary in their neighborhood or near their kid’s school. But they’re not going to change what’s coming, they figure, so why bother?
These voters should take another look: universal legal weed seems less fated every day. States from Kansas to New Hampshire to Virginia have blocked legalization and commercialization; voters themselves even defeated a ballot measure in Oklahoma, despite the state’s thriving “medical” industry. In recent Gallup polling, a majority of Americans said that marijuana negatively affects society and the people who use it—a ten-point shift from 2022.
Floridians could change the narrative. They could decide to avoid the mistakes that voters in New York and California have made and resolve not to let pot peddlers dictate public policy. Where Florida goes, other states may follow.
Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images