Alaska residents will decide Aug. 19 if "The Last Frontier" will be the third U.S. jurisdiction to legalize marijuana and regulate its sale.

The state’s lieutenant governor, Mead Treadwell, confirmed Wednesday that a pro-pot initiative effort cleared the legal requirements and ordered election officials to put legalization before voters.

The Campaign to Regulate Marijuana in Alaska submitted 45,000 signatures Jan. 8 for the ballot measure, about 36,000 of which were validated by the state. Slightly more than 30,000 signatures were required.

“A bipartisan tidal wave of public support for regulating marijuana like alcohol in Alaska has pushed this issue onto the ballot, and we will be running an aggressive campaign designed to build on that momentum,” campaign spokesman Taylor Bickford said in a statement.

Adults over age 21 would be allowed to possess up to 1 ounce of marijuana and grow six plants at home if the initiative is approved by voters.

Stores selling recreational marijuana would be licensed by the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. The legislature would be given the option of creating a Marijuana Control Board.

A quirk in state law requires the measure to appear on the August ballot alongside the primary elections of political parties.

A poll released Feb. 5 by Public Policy Polling found 55 percent support and 39 percent opposition to legalization among Alaskans. A March 2013 poll by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research found 60 percent support.

For years, Alaska was the only state where it was legal to possess marijuana, following a 1975 Alaska Supreme Court decision allowing adults over age 18 to possess 4 ounces of pot and grow 24 plants at home.

The pioneering court ruling considered nearly all of the present-day arguments for and against marijuana, including driving under the influence, the effect of the drug on children and the large number of marijuana-related arrests. It found the state constitution’s privacy guarantees trumped the government’s right to ban pot merely to “protect the individual from his own folly.”

Marijuana, the court found, is “far more innocuous in terms of physiological and social damage than alcohol or tobacco.” It remained a legitimate state interest, the court found, to prohibit use by drivers and children, as well as its sale.

Alaskans voted to recriminalize the drug in 1990 – 54 to 46 percent – but that law was overturned in 2003 by the Alaska Court of Appeals. A 2004 initiative to explicitly legalize marijuana failed with only 44 percent support, and in 2006 the state legislature approved a new law criminalizing pot.

The Alaska legalization initiative would impose a $50-per-ounce tax on marijuana, unlike Colorado – which reaps 25 percent in state taxes from pot sales on top of local taxes – and Washington, which will impose a 25 percent tax on marijuana transactions, in addition to local sales taxes, when stores open in the state this summer.

The Alaska vote may be followed by legalization fights elsewhere. Residents of Arizona, California, Oregon and Washington, D.C., may vote on legalization initiatives in November, with Oregon seen as the surest bet for a win by pro-pot campaigners. The New Hampshire House of Representatives voted Jan. 15 to legalize and regulate pot, but the bill is unlikely to become law this year.

Legalization foes see the upcoming ballot campaigns as an opportunity to break the momentum of pro-pot campaigners. "We feel that if Oregon or Alaska could be stopped, it would disrupt the whole narrative these groups have that legalization is inevitable," Kevin Sabet, executive director of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, told The New York Times.

Many states have reduced pot possession penalties and 20 states and Washington, D.C., allow the drug for medical uses. A Florida initiative to allow medical marijuana – which requires 60 percent support to pass, but which polls suggest is enormously popular – will appear on November ballots.