What’s causing Massachusetts weed paranoia?
This November, Massachusetts voters decided to make recreational marijuana legal, able be bought and sold in a store by January 2018. But this week, state lawmakers quietly voted to delay the sale date by at least six months.
The delay has some marijuana-legalization advocates outraged, less so because theyll have to wait a few months to buy pot and more so because they feel the legislature is trying to subvert the will of the people by fundamentally changing what they voted for. A similar skirmish is happening in Maine over minimum wage, and both have progressives worried their opponents are trying to delay or even reverse their remarkable success via ballot initiatives.
No legislature has inserted themselves in such a way as to extend timelines, said Jim Borghesani, the director of communications for the Massachusetts campaign to legalize marijuana. Its direct democracy by the voters, whether you like it or not.
Massachusetts state lawmakers passed the bill in an informal session Wednesday with just a handful of lawmakers present. Lawmakers told the Boston Globe they wanted more time to set up the bureaucracy around the selling of marijuana. But legalization advocates note that Massachusettss timeline to legalize marijuana matches up with other states that allow it.
That the legislature is involved at all in setting up a timeline is especially frustrating advocates, since the whole point of ballot initiatives is to go around the legislative body. And in a nation dominated by Republican legislatures (Massachusettss is one of a handful controlled by Democrats), going around legislatures is something progressives have had a lot of success with in recent years.
Even though Republicans have a nearly 2-to-1 control of state legislatures, progressive ballot initiatives like legalizing marijuana, creating background checks for gun purchases and raising the minimum wage have often soared through when put to voters.
Marijuana will soon be legal in some form in 29 states and the District of Columbia. Most states only allow medicinal, not recreational, but eight states have now legalized the latter, and the number is growing quickly. But no legislature has approved legalization or decriminalization. (Vermont lawmakers tried this year.) Raising the minimum wage has had comparable success; when put to the voters, minimum wage increases have won all but twice over the past 20 years.
That includes Maine, where the victors of a November ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020 also find themselves battling politicians.
Perennially controversial Republican Gov. Paul LePage has characterized ballot initiatives as recommendations, (theyre not) and his administration recently announced they wouldnt enforce the states new minimum wage law (which passed by more than 10 points) for restaurant servers ...
