BUDDING PROSPECTS
MISSOURIANS WILL GET A CHANCE ON NOVEMBER 8 TO LEGALIZE RECREATIONAL MARIJUANA.
They may well seize it: Nearly two-thirds of registered voters told pollsters in May that they supported the general concept. Other states have made the move—19 at last count—and have so far avoided societal collapse (even if Illinois loves tempting fate). Here in the Show-Me State, we already have a tightly regulated cannabis industry for medicinal purposes; upon passage of the ballot initiative, known as Amendment 3, that industry would stay roughly the same size in the first year but start selling for fun purposes too.
So at the street level, it would look something like this: Those dispensaries you’ve spotted around town would be able to supply bud, gummies, and vape pens to anyone who’s 21 and older; you could just walk in and show ID. Some additional “micro” dispensaries would pop up over the first few years, though probably fewer than 18 across the whole St. Louis area and certainly not one on every corner. Folks may be able to puff away in public, but only if the local government abides—and that government may not even welcome dispensaries at all. (A local ban can be enacted if at least 60 percent of voters want one.) And yes, the state would initially see an annual net tax-revenue boost of at least $35.3 million by official estimates, but that’s not even 2 percent of what we’ll spend next year just laying highways, for example. Thus, a wholesale revolution this would not be.
On the other hand, the petition is 38 pages long and has other provisions that would set Missouri apart in some ways—specifically in how it proposes to expunge criminal records and deepen cannabis-industry diversity. With those measures, the ballot initiative’s official campaign, Legal Missouri 2022, and the alliance of industry players and social-advocacy leaders who compromised on the language, all say they want more than just a new economic sector. They also aim to address an uncomfortable past. To accomplish that, they say, they’ve absorbed lessons from other states and fashioned a proposal that builds on the medical marijuana initiative that passed in 2018 with 66 percent of the vote.
“There were a lot of Black folks locked out [of medical marijuana licensing] simply because of economic disadvantage,” says Adolphus Pruitt, the longtime president of the NAACP’s St. Louis City chapter and a member of the drafting team. Amendment 3, he says, “gives a foothold in the marketplace to those in the communities impacted most by the war on drugs,” and its expungement provision “is something we negotiated and fought hard for.”
Yet Amendment 3 has detractors, too, of all political stripes. Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican and former sheriff, calls it “a disaster.” An op-ed piece in the historically Black St. Louis American newspaper blasts it as a “sinister” proposal that would achieve “no equity.” Mike Wolff, who is a former chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court and a longtime pro-legalization Democrat, laments the petition’s failure to direct the state to issue licenses to all entrepreneurs who meet minimum standards; he fears it will allow an “oligopoly” of companies to control the industry.
The core of the disagreement between these two camps, you might notice, is not whether to end prohibition. It’s how.
all, a mere first pinched those hardy leaves growing near the Himalayas. In cannabis, our ancestors found nutritious seeds and a fiber for making rope and paper. They also discovered the only plant on Earth known to produce tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which our nervous system happens to be well-suited to process. THC soothes nausea and chronic pain, stimulates the appetite, and, at reasonable doses, can turn you into a glowy, giggly joy furnace. It also weakens short-term memory and draws attention to sensory detail. “There is another word,” writes the plants-and-culture journalist Michael Pollan, “for this extremist noticing—this sense of first sight unencumbered by knowingness, by the already-been-theres and seen-thats of the adult mind—and that word, of course, is .”
