Florida Advocacy Petition Drive Aims to Enable Home Growing Cannabis |

A Florida political action committee is leading a petition to legalize and regulate recreational marijuana in the state after two previous legalization efforts were thwarted by the courts earlier this year.

The Florida Sensitive PAC announced Friday that it is “launching a new petition for a proposed amendment to the Florida Constitution that would allow adults 21 and older to grow and use marijuana.”

The group said it launched “an aggressive campaign” to get the proposal to vote next year.

The timing of the petition may seem strange to some, and the prospects of qualifying for the 2022 vote seem bleak.

Cannabis advancement in Florida previously stopped

In June, another constitutional amendment proposed by Sensible Florida was ruled unconstitutional by the state’s Supreme Court. A majority of judges rejected the language of the proposed change, particularly the part that claimed that marijuana would be legalized “for limited use and cultivation by those aged 21 or older,” saying it was ” misleading”.

“First of all, the initiative’s ‘age limit’ is clearly not the ‘limited use’ envisaged in the vote summary,” the majority said. In fact, the executive summary is telling voters that the measure will regulate marijuana ‘for limited use … by those aged 21 and over’. The summary thus informs the voters that the initiative is imposing usage restrictions on people with age entitlement and not that the age restriction itself is a “usage restriction”.

Second, ‘use’ cannot be synonymous with ‘possession’, ‘growth’ or ‘giving’. In fact, the initiative addresses these activities separately … The sponsor’s inability to indicate anything in the text of the action that could plausibly support the “limited use” in the abstract leaves no doubt that the abstract is clearly misleading. “

“We conclude that the wording in the vote summary that the proposed amendment” regulates marijuana … for limited use … by persons 21 years of age or older “is clearly misleading and Section 101.161 (1) of the Florida statutes fail. ”The statement went on. “Accordingly, the proposed change shouldn’t be put on the ballot.”

Sensible Florida said at the time it would go back to the drawing board and offer a new change to qualify for voting next year. But for advocates of legalization in the Sunshine State, the June Supreme Court ruling was all too familiar. In April, the court rejected another electoral measure aimed at legalizing recreational pot consumption in the state, saying the language of the proposal was also misleading.

In that ruling, the court specifically challenged the view that the measure would not change federal marijuana law.

“A constitutional amendment cannot clearly ‘permit’ or authorize behavior that is criminalized under federal law,” wrote Chief Justice Charles Canady. “A vote summary that suggests otherwise is, in the affirmative, misleading.”

The challenges for each proposal were supported by Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, a Republican.

“We thank the Florida Supreme Court for their time and attention to this issue and we respect their judgment,” said a Moody spokesman following the state Supreme Court ruling in April. “Floriders need to understand what they are voting on when they go to the ballot box.”

Other Florida politicians were upset by the decisions. Congressman Charlie Crist, who previously served as the state’s governor, lamented the June ruling, blaming Florida’s current governor, Republican Ron DeSantis.

“The Florida Supreme Court, which @GovRonDeSantis has crammed with partisan judges, has just turned down another voting initiative to get the Floridians to vote on legalizing marijuana. This is wrong. Legalization should be left to the people of Florida, ”Crist tweeted at the time.