A pair of medical marijuana legalization initiatives will not appear on Nebraska’s ballot in November, the state announced on Monday. But while advocates are disappointed, they’re already turning their attention to 2024 for another push.

While activists with Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana (NMM) had held out hope that they turned in enough raw signatures to qualify, the verification process showed that they came up short by about 10,000 signatures for each measure.

In order to qualify, the campaign needed to submit at least 86,776 valid signatures statewide per measure, including at least five percent of registered voters in 38 of the state’s 93 counties.

They ended up with 77,843 signatures for one measure and 77,119 for the other, while also failing to meet the county-level signature threshold for both.

“Certified letters have been mailed to the sponsors notifying them of the results of the signature review,” Secretary of State Bob Evnen (R) said in a press release.

The announcement is a major setback for activists in a campaign that had already been marred with complications.

“To say I’m devastated would be an understatement,” Crista Eggers, chief petitioner of NMM and the mother of a boy who suffers up to 100 epileptic seizures a day, said in an email to supporters on Monday. “Suffering Nebraskans should never be faced with having to move themselves or their families out of the state they call home just to access health care.”

However, Eggers emphasized that the fight isn’t over, and they will be waiting for the detailed results from the state to help inform another reform campaign in 2024, which will likely see stronger turnout since it will be a presidential election year.

Activists “will analyze the data and then we will immediately get to work on qualifying for the 2024 ballot,” she said in the message, which asked supports to donate to help continue the fight. “If you are with me, and with my amazing fighter of a son Colton, I’m asking you to dig deep, to not get discouraged and to commit to turning the progress of the last two years into meaningful, successful progress for the thousands of suffering Nebraskans.”

“We trust the election and signature verification process and accept the results,” Sen. Adam Morfeld (D), who helped to lead the petitioning effort, told Marijuana Moment.

I want to thank everyone for their hard work to legalize Medical Marijuana in Nebraska. Thousands of Nebraskans came together to collect an unprecedented number of grassroots signatures after two of our major donors passed away unexpectedly.

We will not back down. More to come. https://t.co/w8kkeW6zDK

— State Senator Adam Morfeld (@Adam_Morfeld) August 22, 2022

Hopes has been raised when a lower court ruled in favor of a challenge from the campaign, temporarily enjoining the state against enforcing the geographic-based ballot requirement. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eight Circuit overturned that ruling last month.

Attorneys general from 15 conservative state separately filed a brief in favor of maintaining the country-based signature rule.

NMM had already lost critical campaign funding earlier this year, leading to its eventual reliance on volunteer signature gathering efforts.

The campaign, which was also co-chaired by Sen. Anna Wishart (D) along with Morfeld, announced in May that it was restructuring its plan to put medical marijuana legalization on the ballot after losing that funding. It aimed to raise $1 million so that it could hire paid signature canvassers, but after the death of one key donor and terminal diagnosis of another, the campaign is left with just about $30,000 on hand.

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Supporters held a virtual press conference that month to detail their new plan to qualify a pair of cannabis initiatives for the November ballot.

One initiative would have required lawmakers to codify protections for doctors who recommend cannabis and patients who purchase and possess it. The other would have mandated legislative action to safeguard marijuana businesses that supply the product.

The reason that the measures were narrowly tailored and bifurcated was because activists wanted to avoid the type of legal challenge that led the state Supreme Court to invalidate a prior medical cannabis legalization measure that they successfully collected more than enough signatures for to qualify for the 2020 ballot.

The court ruled that year that the initiative violated the single-subject rule for ballot measures because it took a comprehensive approach to setting regulations for the program.

Lawmakers attempted to advance medical cannabis reform legislatively last year, but while the unicameral legislature debated a bill to legalize medical marijuana in May, it failed to advance past a filibuster because the body didn’t have enough votes to overcome it.

Bad news. Medical marijuana initiative petitions fail to make November ballot.https://t.co/ydzZygtNWB pic.twitter.com/PXEAcwvkk0

— Nebraska Democratic Party (@NebraskaDems) August 22, 2022

Meanwhile, the campaign also faced resistance from Gov. Pete Ricketts (R), a staunch opponent of legalization. Late last year, he partnered with the prohibitionist group SAM Nebraska on an ad urging residents to oppose cannabis reform in the state.

For his part, Nebraska’s attorney general argued in an opinion in 2019 that efforts to legalize medical marijuana legislatively in the state would be preempted by federal law and “would be, therefore, unconstitutional.”

Here’s the state of play for other drug policy reform ballot measures in 2022: 

North Dakota voters will have the chance to decide on marijuana legalization at the ballot this November, the secretary of state’s office confirmed.

In neighboring South Dakota, a marijuana legalization initiative has again qualified for the ballot.

The Arkansas Supreme Court recently ordered the secretary of state’s office to certify a marijuana legalization initiative for the November ballot—but there’s a chance that the votes will not end up being counted, depending on the final outcome of a pending legal challenge.

Maryland elections officials have finalized the language for a marijuana legalization referendum that lawmakers placed on the November ballot, and have issued a formal summary of the reform proposal.

Colorado voters will have the chance to decide on a historic ballot initiative this November to legalize psychedelics and create licensed psilocybin “healing centers” where people can use the substance for therapeutic purposes.

The Oklahoma attorney general revised the ballot title of a marijuana legalization initiative that activists hope will be certified to go before the state’s voters, making mostly technical changes that the campaign views as satisfactory.

Missouri’s secretary of state announced earlier this month that activists had turned in enough signatures to put marijuana legalization on the state’s November ballot.

Michigan activists announced in June that they will no longer be pursuing a statewide psychedelics legalization ballot initiative for this year’s election and will instead focus on qualifying the measure to go before voters in 2024.

The campaign behind an effort to decriminalize drugs and expand treatment and recovery services in Washington State said in June that it has halted its push to qualify an initiative for November’s ballot.

While Wyoming activists said earlier this year that they made solid progress in collecting signatures for a pair of ballot initiatives to decriminalize marijuana possession and legalize medical cannabis, they didn’t get enough to make the 2022 ballot deadline and will be aiming for 2024 while simultaneously pushing the legislature to advance reform even sooner.

In March, California activists announced that they came up short on collecting enough signatures to qualify a measure to legalize psilocybin mushrooms for the state’s November ballot, though they aren’t giving up on a future election cycle bid.

An effort to put adult-use legalization on the statewide ballot in Ohio fizzled out this year, but the campaign did secure a procedural legal win that will allow them to hit the ground running for a planned 2023 reform initiative.

Locally, Ohio voters in at least seven cities will get a chance to join many of their neighboring jurisdictions in enacting local marijuana decriminalization at the ballot this November.

Voters in five Texas cities will also vote on local cannabis decriminalization measures this year.

Advocates have also worked to place local decriminalization ordinances on the ballot in West Virginia.

Wisconsin voters in at least half a dozen cities and counties will also be asked on November’s ballot whether they support legalizing, taxing and regulating cannabis in a manner similar to alcohol. Those Wisconsin advisory questions will be non-binding, however, and are intended to take the temperature of voters and send a message to lawmakers about where their constituents stand.

Voters In Five Texas Cities Will Decide On Marijuana Decriminalization In November, Activists Say

Photo courtesy of Philip Steffan.

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