Nebraskan Crista Eggers is facing a July 3 deadline. If she can get at least 87,000 names onto each of two petitions before then, she can put an initiative on the state’s November ballot that would legalize pot for medicinal purposes, Stateline reports. The petition effort is personal. Her 9-year-old son, Colton, has epilepsy and severe seizures, and medicinal cannabis can be prescribed to treat them. “I’m a caregiver to a child that needs medical cannabis access. Ninety-five percent of our people collecting [signatures] are Nebraskans who know someone who needs access and needs this issue on the ballot,” said Eggers, an Omaha resident and the campaign manager for Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana. If the group is successful, Nebraska will join Florida and South Dakota in asking voters this fall whether to legalize some marijuana use. In Florida and South Dakota, where medical marijuana is already allowed, voters will be asked to legalize adult recreational use.
Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia allow the medical use of cannabis products, and 24 plus D.C. allow adults to use it recreationally, says the National Conference of State Legislatures. Cannabis is still illegal under federal law, but 74% of Americans now live in a state where marijuana is legal for either recreational or medical use and 54% live in a place where it is legal for recreational use, says the Pew Research Center.
Many states, especially left-leaning ones, have legalized marijuana through legislation, but “there are some states where the state legislators still don’t want to touch this issue of cannabis legislation, particularly in more conservative parts of the country,” said Beau Kilmer of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center. In Kansas, where legislative efforts to legalize marijuana have repeatedly foundered since 2021, conservative legislators again this session blocked a measure to legalize medicinal use, with one Republican lawmaker, Sen. Mike Thompson, saying the substance could “cause more suicides and human misery.” Kansas is one of the 24 states that don’t allow citizen-initiated ballot measures. The destigmatizing of marijuana use has advanced so far that even some conservative states have legalized it through legislative action: Since 2020, four of the five states to legalize cannabis for medicinal purposes — Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Virginia — have done so through the legislature.