Weed in Florida

Opinion editor’s note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

For Floridians caught up in the emotional and legal tumult of last week’s conflicting duo of Florida Supreme Court abortion rulings, we have a suggestion: Take a break, and have some pot.

Or at least take the time to peruse the equally complex — but far more amusing — ruling that will let voters weigh in on whether marijuana should be legalized for all Floridians over the age of 21. (The question, designated Amendment 3, authorizes adults to buy up to three ounces of marijuana for personal use, even if they don’t have a medical condition that qualifies them.)

In her majority opinion, Justice Jamie Grosshans provided a judicial smackdown of epic proportions. She didn’t restrict herself to needling Attorney General Ashley Moody, who asked the court to block the marijuana amendment from the 2024 ballot. In a separate concurring opinion, Grosshans effectively trolled her fellow justices who tried in vain to shore up Moody’s argument.

From the start, Moody’s case for knocking the marijuana amendment off the ballot were weak. She and the “friend of the court” groups who backed her challenge tried and failed to nitpick the ballot question to death. Among their arguments: Florida voters might not understand that marijuana is still illegal under federal law, or that the state will have to write the rules under which pot can be obtained by Floridians over the age of 21.

Grosshans’ response: Perhaps you might want to invest in a dictionary. (She actually recommends a few.) Voters are perfectly capable of figuring this one out for themselves, she wrote, using the common meaning of words like “allow” and “license.” She swept aside another frankly idiotic argument that the amendment doesn’t meet the single-subject requirement because it talks about the sale and use of pot: “Allowing businesses to distribute personal-use marijuana, and authorizing individuals to possess it, are logically and naturally related,” she wrote. “Legalization of marijuana presumes the product will be available for the consumer.”

She didn’t conclude with “Well, DUH.” But did she really need to?

Nor did she need to recap marijuana’s current status in Florida: Recreational pot is available right now, for anyone with the money and time to pursue it and the moral ambiguity to evade the intent of the amendment.

Ironically that means voters were essentially hoodwinked in 2016, when they signed off on a supposedly highly restrictive amendment allowing very sick Floridians to buy medical marijuana under tightly controlled conditions.

That’s not how things worked out.

That’s not the fault of voters, or the organizers of the 2016 ballot question. It’s entirely the fault of state regulators and legislators who determinedly looked the other way as Florida’s medical-marijuana industry cranked into high gear. Instead, state leaders focused almost entirely on what they saw as the real issue with medical marijuana — which powerful interests would be allowed to get rich first, and how much they could rake in.

Meanwhile, nobody was paying attention to how the guardrails on the 2016 ballot question were being flattened. That amendment required pot users to get a signoff from a doctor that they met the requirements specified in the amendment, which included debilitating health conditions including cancer, multiple sclerosis and legitimate cases of post-traumatic stress disorder. The 2026 amendment left one loophole, by including ailments “of a similar kind or class.”

At first timid and then bold, the industry stretched that phrase to the breaking point. As we observed in a July editorial: “Questions like ‘Do you have cancer? Multiple sclerosis? Parkinson’s?’ gave way to ‘Do you have depression? Anxiety? Stress? Uh — writer’s cramp?”’

The majority opinion didn’t really go into that, but Florida voters are capable of seeing that reality for themselves. That makes voter approval of the 2024 amendment likely, and further underscores the court’s ruling that voters have a right to expand protections to recreational pot usage.