Anti-marijuana forces nationwide likely to now focus all their time and effort on closing dispensaries in Massachusetts
Whether you’re in Mass or Arizona, cold or hot, damp or dry, you have likely encountered loud unsavory prohibitionist liars with clipboards these past few months.
The difference between these two drug war battlegrounds, though, as of this week, is that in Arizona anti-marijuana grifters are taking a rest. For now.
That’s because while voters in the Bay State will face a measure on this year’s November ballot that could close adult-use pot shops, a similar effort in the Grand Canyon State crawled into a hole and died on Tuesday. The Arizona Capitol Times reports:
Sean Noble told Capitol Media Services he is scrapping his plan to ask Arizona voters in November to reconsider the legality of recreational use.
Noble, the founder and president of the conservative-oriented American Encore, said he started the initiative petition drive not to oppose the medicinal use of marijuana, legalized by voters in 2010, but to address the abuses stemming from the 2020 marijuana law which allows all adults above the age of 21 to buy, grow and use the marijuana for recreational purposes.
“I’ve adjusted my viewpoints on the threat to kids,” said Noble. “I went into it with a pretty profound belief that it was happening,” he said this week, but admitted this was not based on any personal knowledge. “I was kind of relying on things that I had seen or read from other people.”
Only by doing further research, Noble said, did he come to the conclusion that his assumptions were wrong. “They have not done some of the things that I thought they were doing,” he said of those selling the drug.
This may be the first and only time in history that a narc has essentially conceded being wrong and having a slight change of heart. At the same time, the reporter signals that Noble killed the petition drive because of President Trump’s move to reschedule medical cannabis nationally, and because of how much it would cost to move ahead with what was likely a futile initiative. More from the newspaper of record:
Proposition 207, the 2020 initiative legalizing marijuana for recreational use, was approved by a 3-2 margin. And Noble said he hasn’t seen a major change in public attitudes in the past six years that would make it worth the time — and money — to try and overturn that majority.
Though some have reported apparent ties between SAM Action, the Virginia-based dark money group funding the ballot referendum in Mass, and the Arizona Repeal Marijuana Legalization Initiative, we are not able to find the paper trail. Kevin Sabet, the arch-prohibitionist founder of SAM, has spoken publicly about backing repeal efforts in Maine and Mass, but Arizona seemed to be a literally and figuratively distant third dream.
Whatever the level of Sabet and SAM’s involvement up to this point in the failed desert attack, this new development frees up more time and money for the commonwealth assault. The Vacationland campaign is also on hold; Maine marijuana haters didn’t file in time to qualify for the 2026 ballot, but that state allows petitioners to sit on signatures for a whole year, so be ready for a sneak attack up north.
In the meantime, Massachusetts voters will have to contend with the full deceitful forces of SAM Action and its many millions. Indeed, we already are.
