Cannibis
The Florida Supreme Court last week canceled oral arguments on the ballot language of a proposed initiative to legalize recreational marijuana for Florida adults, effectively keeping the measure off the November statewide ballot.
With Justice Jorge Labarga as the sole dissenter in the Feb. 4 decision, the high court accepted state Attorney General James Uthmeier’s request that litigation on the validity of the text of the “Adult Personal Use of Marijuana” initiative be dismissed. The court’s majority did not explain its reasoning.
Uthmeier
In December, Uthmeier sought the court’s advisory opinion about whether the text of the measure complied with provisions of both the state and U.S. constitutions, as well as state law. But on Feb. 2, Secretary of State Cord Byrd said he determined that the marijuana measure failed to meet the signature threshold to be placed on the fall ballot later this year.
“The attorney general therefore respectfully submits that the court should dismiss this case and cancel the oral argument scheduled for Feb. 5, 2026,” Uthmeier’s Notice of Dismissal filing states.
In a post he made on X, formerly Twitter, Uthmeier said the high court made the right call.
“Even with all the fraud and forgery, the latest weed initiative couldn't garner enough public support to make the ballot,” he said in the Feb. 4 post. “The Florida Supreme Court appropriately just dismissed the case. Floridians can continue to breathe the free air for another election cycle.”
But the group that sponsored the initiative, Smart & Safe Florida, argues the court’s ruling may not be the final word in the dispute since pending legal actions will determine whether thousands of signature petitions were improperly invalidated.
“(The Feb. 4) order does not decide the merits of Smart & Safe’s ballot language, and it leaves open the possibility for the court to review the ballot language once the pending disputes over tens of thousands of wrongfully invalidated petitions have been resolved,” a Smart & Safe spokesperson said in a statement emailed to the Florida Record.
In a response to Uthmeier’s Notice of Dismissal filed with the high court, attorneys for Smart & Safe noted that the sponsor launched a lawsuit against Byrd and the Leon County elections supervisor challenging the invalidation of 70,000 petitions. The signatures were alleged to have come from “inactive” voters or were improperly collected by non-residents or non-citizens.
A circuit judge ruled in January that state elections officials improperly rejected about 42,000 petitions signed by inactive voters while upholding the invalidation of nearly 30,000 petitions that were collected by individuals who were from other states, according to the Ballotpedia website. An appeals court later that month concluded that all the contested signatures were invalid.
A federal appeals court is also holding proceedings on the Florida rules barring non-citizens and non-residents from gathering initiative signatures, according to Smart & Safe.
“Should the sponsor prevail in those actions, up to 98,000 petitions would be added to the total, easily surpassing the 880,062 necessary for ballot placement,” Smart & Safe’s attorneys said in the state Supreme Court filing.
The initiative sponsor has also argued that the court should not give the secretary of state “effectively unreviewable discretion” to withhold initiatives from the state ballot.
A similar recreational marijuana initiative won 55.9% approval from state voters in 2024, but such Florida initiatives need to win by a 60% margin to become law. The latest measure would have allowed adults 21 and over to use and possess marjuana but would have barred marketing the drug to children as well as smoking or vaping in public.
