Justices toss challenge against dark money-backed proposal
A controversial push to revoke recreational marijuana legalization remains on track to be decided by voters after the state’s highest court on Friday rejected a legal challenge seeking to toss the measure.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the attorney general’s office properly certified and summarized the question, whose campaign is funded by a national dark-money group fighting legal drug use in multiple states.
If organizers collect enough signatures this month — which is nearly guaranteed given that the final haul required is far less than an earlier signature threshold — the measure will lock in a spot on the November ballot, tasking Bay Staters with choosing whether to walk back their 2016 vote to legalize and launch a multibillion-dollar recreational cannabis industry.
The campaign has been fraught with controversy, both over the policy particulars and over the route taken.
Earlier this year, opponents alleged that the campaign obtained signatures “fraudulently” by misleading voters and describing the question as related to affordable housing or funding public parks. The State Ballot Law Commission dismissed the challenge.
The lawsuit before the SJC took another approach. In that case, plaintiffs argued that Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office should have deemed the question ineligible because it combined unrelated topics and would allow a “taking of private property without providing compensation.” They also contended that the AG’s summary failed to communicate to voters that the ballot question would eliminate marijuana industry social equity grants — which the plaintiffs themselves received — and some cannabis-related penalties.
Justices disagreed. The question’s “limited effects on the regulation of medical marijuana” do not rise to an improper comingling of discrete topics, Justice Elizabeth Dewar wrote in the decision. The sections of the ballot measure that would eliminate social equity programs and mandatory host community agreements “all bear an operational relationship” to the proposal’s primary goal, she added.
“As the plaintiffs argue, there indeed may be voters who favor restricting recreational marijuana but do not favor eliminating these other aspects of the current regulatory regime in relation to medical marijuana,” Dewar wrote. “Nonetheless, the proposed measure does not place voters in ‘the untenable position of casting a single vote on two or more dissimilar subjects.’”
The court also ruled that the AG’s written summary is sufficient, even with a broad generalization of the existing laws the question would repeal. Justices noted, as case law has found, that “the summary is not the only source of information for voters” — a line that could play a role in a forthcoming decision about a ballot question seeking to cut the income tax rate, which also faces an eligibility challenge hinging on the official summary.
Three other SJC decisions on ballot questions are expected in the coming weeks: the income tax cut, a measure seeking to revive rent control with a strict statewide cap, and a proposal to place all primary election candidates on a single ballot regardless of party.
Those rulings, plus ongoing talks about compromise legislation that could replace ballot questions, will decide the final size of the field this November. If every proposal advances to the ballot, it would be a record 11 questions.
