The Republic | azcentral.com Sun Jan 5, 2014 8:43 AM

Supporters of an effort to legalize marijuana in Arizona this year see their chances fading, an organizer told The Arizona Republic last week, even as thousands of Colorado residents lined up to buy pot from the nation’s first recreational-marijuana shops.

Many Arizona marijuana advocates hope to replicate Colorado’s model of regulated pot for recreational use, but it likely won’t happen in 2014 as organizers had hoped. The real effort, some say, will come in 2016, when an influential group is expected to substantially fund an initiative.

Marijuana is legal for about 40,000 Arizonans, but only for medicinal purposes. Patients must get recommendations from a physician and obtain a card from state health officials under the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act approved by voters in 2010.

If the Safer Arizona initiative were to make it on the November ballot, it would ask voters to amend the state Constitution to allow people 18 and older “to consume or possess limited amounts” of marijuana for recreational use — not solely for medicinal purposes.

But supporters have gathered just 10,000 of the 259,213 valid signatures needed by July 3 to qualify for the ballot. While marijuana-advocacy groups and some student organizations support the effort, it has no major financial backing to fund signature gathering.

“We still are behind schedule on getting petition signatures,” said Dennis Bohlke, a north Phoenix resident who is leading the initiative, adding that supporters are “not ready to throw in the towel yet.”

“We’ve got high hopes,” he said, the day before hitting a Phoenix library to gather signatures. “But I don’t want to sound unrealistic,” suggesting the group may fail to qualify for the ballot.

Bohlke and others said the next best chance to push to legalize recreational marijuana in Arizona is in 2016.

By then, they say, Colorado’s program will be established enough to identify which portions of the program might work in Arizona, and which might not. That, said one veteran public-opinion pollster, could sway voters one way or another based on information from “people who are actually experiencing something” on the controversial issue.

“Colorado ... could move things in a positive or negative direction rather quickly because it is a complete change in the environment and there’s an actual instance of legalization in a neighboring state that’s getting a lot of publicity,” pollster Mike O’Neil said.

O’Neil pointed out that public support for legalizing marijuana is at an all-time high. One national survey of 1,501 people last year by the Pew Research Center found 52 percent said marijuana should be legal, while 45 percent said it should not. Pew said support for legalizing pot has risen 11 percentage points since 2010.

“It’s clear ... that on the national level, there is a movement in this direction,” O’Neil said.

But without significant funding to gather enough signatures to make the ballot, he said, Safer Arizona’s effort “sounds pretty doubtful.”

“The bar is set pretty high unless you’ve got a lot of money to get signatures,” he said. “If you don’t, you have to have something that has a groundswell of support.”

Come back in a few years, he said, “and you might get a different result.”

That’s what the Marijuana Policy Project is banking on. The Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates for marijuana legalization and regulation intends to pursue full legalization in Arizona through a voter initiative in 2016 and in several other states over the next two election cycles.

The Arizona initiative effort will be modeled on Colorado’s program, approved by voters in 2012. For about a year, Colorado has allowed adults 21 and older to use and possess up to an ounce of pot; marijuana shops were allowed to open last Wednesday.

Marijuana Policy Project Communications Director Mason Tvert, who ran Colorado’s legalization initiative, said significant funding is needed to pay for signature gathering to qualify for a ballot. And, he said, history has shown that marijuana-legalization efforts are more successful during higher-turnout presidential elections — not midterm elections.

“That’s why we’re doing it in 2016,” he said. “It’s a presidential-election year, and traditionally, the more people who vote, the more support we see for ending marijuana prohibition.”

Tvert said supporters of an Arizona initiative will closely watch Colorado over the next two years to see how the program is handled.

“It will ultimately be up to the Legislature or the voters to decide what system will be best,” he said. “It’s critical we write a strong initiative, and we intend to do that the same way we did in Colorado.”