Adult use campaign suspended, NORML lobby day canceled
In an email to Missouri NORML, state president Dan Viets, a Columbia attorney, announced the adult-use campaign – 2020-128 – has been suspended due to the viral pandemic.
Additionally, Viets also announced that the planned April 22 lobby day to the state capitol is also canceled, noting hope that there were no threats to patients from the scaled-back legislative session.
He also announced tentative plans for a statewide conference in October 2020.
Viets wrote:
The campaign to place adult-use and cultivation legalization on the November 2020 ballot has officially ended. The campaign committee, Missourians for a New Approach, has reluctantly reached the conclusion that we simply cannot succeed in gathering sufficient signatures to achieve that goal due to the response to the coronavirus pandemic which has made petitioning very difficult.
We had hoped that it might be possible to persuade the state of Missouri to allow online signature gathering under the extraordinary circumstances we find ourselves in this spring. However, that has not proven to be an option and there does not appear to be any other path to gathering the 170,000 valid signatures we would require prior to the deadline in early May.
We do hope that the campaign will resume next year with the goal of placing adult use and cultivation legalization on the ballot in November of 2022. It appears that Missourians are ready to embrace legalization if given the opportunity to vote on it.
We also regret to announce that the third Missouri NORML 2020 Lobby Day, which had been planned for Wednesday, April 22, must also be canceled. The Missouri legislature is not in session at this time. They are tentatively planning to convene a session on Monday, April 27, but the business to be done will be very narrowly focused on a few essential matters.
The good news is that it is almost certain that the effort to ban telehealth appointments for medical marijuana patients will not pass this year. We have succeeded in laying the foundation for the passage of progressive legislation, perhaps as soon as next year. We will be working to build support for measures that would ban discrimination against medical marijuana patients in parenting rights and employment rights.
The Fall 2020 Missouri NORML State Conference is tentatively scheduled for Saturday, October 10, at the University of Missouri in Columbia. NORML’s founder and staff counsel, Keith Stroup, plans to join us for this event. Please mark your calendar now and plan to be with us in Columbia for the celebration of NORML’s 50th Anniversary.
