A marijuana industry-backed campaign to put a legalization initiative before voters on the 2024 ballot has cleared its first hurdle, with enough signatures on a petition to initiate a state Supreme Court review of its language.
Smart & Safe Florida filed the measure last summer, and the campaign has so far turned in 294,037 valid signatures to get the review started—a key step toward ballot placement, as News Service Florida first reported. They needed 222,898 signatures to prompt the court review of the initiative.
The Florida Supreme Court will be looking to make sure that the text of the proposal doesn’t violate the state Constitution’s single subject rule and isn’t affirmatively misleading to voters.
If the court determines that the initiative meets those standards, the campaign will need to collect a total of at least 891,589 signatures to make the ballot next year.
Past attempts to place adult-use legalization on the Florida ballot have been challenged and rejected by the court.
The Smart & Safe Florida political committee initiative is being funded almost entirely by the state’s largest medical cannabis operator Trulieve, which provided initial seed money to get the campaign off the ground and has now contributed $20 million
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