Arkansas voters won’t get to weigh in on a ballot initiative to expand medical marijuana after the state Supreme Court ruled the measure didn’t fully explain what it would do, tossing out the initiative just two weeks before the election.
It’s too late to remove the measure from the ballot — early voting began Monday — so the court has ordered election officials not to count any votes cast on it. The proposed constitutional amendment would have broadened the definition of medical professionals who can certify patients for medical cannabis, expanded qualifying conditions and made medical cannabis cards valid for three years.
It sounds like the state has been trying to stop this vote, but couldn’t.
So they pull this last minute shit after early voting already started, and not only is it not “counting” like it won’t pass, they’re literally not counting the votes so supporters can’t say it already has the votes next time.
This is accurate.
They pulled similar tomfuckery with the abortion amendment ballot initiative.
Yeah, it sucks living here.
Time after time when Pro Choice or Recreational Marijuana ballot measures go to voters, they get voted into law.
Conservatives keep showing they aren’t interested in fulfilling the will of the people but instead enforcing their minority opinion on the majority.
Desperation by the rapidly dwindling authoritarian party to make people do what the folks in power want. Shame that the courts, with their democratically elected judges for lower circuits, aren’t stuffed full of democratic or progressive thinkers. Maybe this election will show how corrupt and futile it is to do things the authorized way when the authorities keep changing the rules.
Harm the futures of authoritarians.
Interestingly, all 7 justices are white (3 men, 4 women), while Arkansas has roughly 28% of the state who are people of color.
Representation is important.
Ratfuckery of the highest order.
I was a live in caretaker for both my parents for the last 10 and 6 years of their lives respectively. And I can say with 100% assurity that both would have benefitted from MJ medical or otherwise for pain management. My father broke his body decades ago. He had been officially “disabled” since 1989. He died of inoperable lung cancer in 2015. My mother, she had cancer which she beat. But the radiation treatment basically destroyed her body. Last 10 years of life she was in constant severe arthritis pain in her joints and back. No muscle. She looked like a skeleton with a sheet pulled over her.
I offered to source them marijuana on the street level. Both of them. Because they both needed it badly. But neither could do that because of how they were treated by pain clinics. One test with an unauthorized substance in their blood and thats a wrap. No more pain meds of any kind. They’d have been forced to use harder street drugs. And we all know precisely what a slippery slope that is.
Marijuana should be 50 state legal no questions asked. Wanna overregulate something dangerous? Tobacco and Alcohol are both orders of magnitude more harmful and dangerous. Yet they’re regulated about as hard as Soda is, if that. For that matter, go after Sugar. That shit is literally poison and its in everything.
