Idaho Advocates Plan Legalization Voter Initiative for 2020

Advocacy groups Legalize Idaho and Idaho Moms for Marijuana held a rally at the Idaho State Capitol Building on New Year’s Day in support of a cannabis legalization bid for the 2020 ballot, according to KTVB.com.

To help make their point, legalization advocates collected items like alcohol, tobacco, and donuts to demonstrate products that are more harmful to public health than cannabis but are still legal in Idaho.

Legalize Idaho plans to launch a campaign in February to collect signatures for putting an initiative to legalize cannabis on the 2020 ballot. Idaho is one of the few remaining holdouts on any sort of cannabis reform — nearly every single state surrounding Idaho has some form of legal cannabis, whether adult-use or medical, including Canada.

“The rest of the country is passing us by and we are completely surrounded on our little island of prohibition.” — Serra Frank, cannabis advocate, in a KTVB interview

Opponent groups like Drug Free Idaho will put up a fight, however. Countering the statement by advocate Serra Frank, the director of Drug Free Idaho told KTVB that Idaho was rather, “an island of sanity in a sea of insanity. We have a narrative right now of, there is zero bad things that happen when you have more marijuana, and we just don’t think that’s the case.”

Ultimately, advocates support leaving the question for voters via their petition and future ballot initiative.

Said Frank, “The people of Idaho want it, the politicians might not, we don’t care what they say. We are the people, this is our Capitol building, we are going to make this happen.”