After the Florida House of Representatives threw in the towel this week, abandoning the legislative session three days early, medical marijuana was declared dead in Tallahassee for the 2015 session.
That’s why the group United for Care has said screw it, and is heading back to the ballot box to give voters another go-round.
“Our goal is to get a medical marijuana law passed in the state of Florida and to do so as quick as possible,” said United for Care director Ben Pollara during a radio interview with this reporter on WMNF Community Radio.
The idea had been to work with the Legislature to approve a bill proposed by St. Petersburg area state Sen. Jeff Brandes that would have provided fairly comprehensive access to medical marijuana for patients suffering from a variety of ailments. That bill never made it out of committee and was instead replaced by another less comprehensive bill.
State Sen. Rob Bradley’s replacement bill was dubbed the “Charlotte’s Web glitch bill” because it aimed to legalize and regulate medical cannabis low in THC. A bill approved in 2014 already did that, but it has yet to be enacted due to a regulatory stranglehold.
“It was not everything that we wanted but it was certainly much, much better than what existed previously,” Pollara said.
And it did get even better. Bradley ended up amending the bill to up the allowable THC level from a next-to-nothing 0.08 percent to 15 percent. That basically means just normal pot.
But …
“[It] died when the House decided to quit,” Pollara said.
Now he says he just doesn’t trust the Florida Legislature.
“They’ve failed again and again and again on this issue,” Pollara said.
Medical marijuana didn’t get any legislative hearings in Florida for years. They’ve continued to stall on comprehensive legislation and the one bill they did pass got thrown into a regulatory nightmare to never see the light of day.
Pollara didn’t say so exactly, but there’s reason to believe that the Charlotte’s Web bill passed in 2014 was merely a ploy to keep voters from siding with United for Care on the Amendment 2 ballot measure.
He pointed out that lawmakers had remained silent on the issue until a ballot measure was a sure thing. Then, suddenly, they pushed a bill with no teeth.
“I think it is telling,” Pollara said.
The Legislature’s inaction comes after more than half of all voters in the 2014 election favored comprehensive medical marijuana. More people voted for medical pot than voted for the governor and most lawmakers – 58 percent. In many other states, that would have been enough to pass, but Florida requires a 60 percent majority.
Regardless, the thought process had been that even though the amendment didn’t pass, the message was clear and that would leave reluctant lawmakers with no choice but to make medical marijuana a priority.
Or at least stop standing in the way.
But they didn’t so now it’ll head back to the voters. United for Care already has nearly 50,000 petitions gathered and that’s just from a barebones effort among a small group of volunteers.
“We’re already way ahead of where we were in 2013,” Pollara said referring to the close-call petition effort in which the group had to pay volunteers a steep per-petition fee to get the job done.
Pollara has no reason to believe the petition effort will be an issue this year. In fact, he said the group probably won’t have to pay nearly as much to get the measure on the 2016 ballot.
And as for those lawmakers still standing firm in their “pot isn’t medicine” stance, the ballot measure will share a ballot with presidential candidates. That means more voters at the polls.
