COVID-19 could cancel Missouri recreational marijuana campaign, says activist group

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The future of an effort to get recreational marijuana onto Missouri's November 2020 ballot is "unclear," according to a statement circulated early Saturday by Missouri attorney and cannabis activist Dan Viets.

Viets is the state coordinator for the pro-cannabis group NORML and is an advisory board member for Missourians for a New Approach, the entity backing the current push for recreational, sometimes called "adult use," cannabis in the Show-Me State.

"No official decision has yet been made regarding whether to suspend the campaign," the written statement said.

But it's not looking good, and that's because of the current pandemic. While Missouri is one of a handful of U.S. states without any stay-at-home order covering its whole territory, St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield and Columbia all have stay-at-home orders in place, in a bid to "flatten the curve" of COVID-19 infection rates.

"Everything political has been impacted by the response to the virus, not just recreational marijuana," Viets told the News-Leader Saturday.

His estimate of signatures gathered so far? "At least 60,000."

Under state law, New Approach would need to gather 160,000 petition signatures by May in order to get recreational weed onto the November 2020 ballot.

Viets said most of their current signature total was collected before the response to coronavirus geared up.

Now, it's "virtually impossible to effectively gather signatures on petitions given the response to the coronavirus pandemic," Viets said in the statement.

If New Approach suspends the campaign, they'll try again, he said.

"2022 is not that far off," Viets told the News-Leader. "And I'm not making any declaration, I'm just speaking my opinion that it's likely we'd try to go forward in 2022."

He said he thinks recreational cannabis would win at that time, even though a mid-cycle election like 2022 would likely attract fewer voters than a presidential election year like this one.

"The support for taxing and regulating the adult use of marijuana is growing all the time," he said.

The last significant campaign push to add signatures to the New Approach recreational petition appears to have been on March 10, the day of Missouri's presidential primary vote.

The campaign, backed by New Approach, was announced in January, a week after Missouri health authorities handed out licenses for commercial cannabis dispensaries in the Show-Me State's fledgling medical marijuana program. Voters approved medical cannabis in November 2018.

A Missouri Health Department spokesperson previously said she doesn't expect delays in the implementation of the new medical cannabis program. Meanwhile, the department's medical marijuana section has approved roughly 40,000 patients for lawful use of medicinal weed so far, even as state authorities grapple with the pandemic.

Gregory Holman is the investigative reporter for the News-Leader and has been following Missouri cannabis news since Amendment 2 was on the ballot in November 2018. Email news tips to gholman@gannett.com and consider supporting vital local journalism by subscribing. Learn more by visiting News-Leader.com/subscribe.