FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Outside the grocery store, farmer’s market and outdoor festivals, solicitors carry clipboards and urge Floridians to sign their petitions.
The multimillion-dollar movement pushes forward in Florida to allow voters to decide whether to make recreational use of marijuana legal in 2024. Behind the push are big players in the cannabis industry who already cater to the 788,297 people in Florida with medical marijuana cards The multistate cannabis operator Trulieve has been a major contributor, giving $5.5 million to the “Smart & Safe Florida” political committee spearheading the petition drive.
Legalizing recreational marijuana is a high-stakes initiative that comes as Florida is poised to award cannabis-growing licenses to another 22 companies in April, adding to the 22 currently licensed operators.
“Florida is the largest medical marijuana market in the country,” said Cris Rivera, Florida Regional President, Cresco Labs, a cannabis company that operates 23 Sunnyside stores in Florida. “It’s a really, really great market. We have fantastic quality products and every assortment mix you can imagine.”
With marijuana production in the state poised to ramp up further, researchers are studying the risks. So far, research shows fake weed has made its way into the state, sickening or killing Floridians. The real stuff, which has medicinal benefits for some people, has health risks, too.
Will recreational marijuana soon be legal?
When Floridians vote for their next president in 2024, they also may have the chance to vote whether to legalize marijuana for recreational use. As of 2022, 21 states already have legalized the adult use of marijuana for recreational purposes.
The Smart & Safe Florida initiative to get legalized recreational marijuana on the November 2024 ballot already passed its first hurdle, collecting enough signatures to get the Florida Supreme Court to review the proposed constitutional amendment. If given the green light by the Supreme Count, the measure would still need hundreds of thousands more signatures to get onto the ballot.
Proponents believe they will clear all hurdles.
A survey released in February 2022 by the University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab revealed three in four Floridians are ready to legalize pot. The survey shows majority support for legalizing cannabis possession across every demographic, including party, age, sex, race and education.
“There’s a lot of enthusiasm around it,” said John Sullivan, executive vice president of government affairs for Cresco Labs. “Sixty percent of the voters have to approve it so it’s going to be about getting the word out.”
In 2014, Florida voters approved making medical marijuana legal. The last few years have seen particularly big increases in demand — the number of people with medical cannabis cards jumped from about 65,310 cardholders in 2018 to nearly 789,000 in 2023.
“If it gets approved for recreational use, we are going to see a massive change from today’s numbers,” said Cresco Labs’ Rivera. “We are going from less than a million people that we are servicing to a population of 22 million people [in Florida], plus visitors to the state — estimates suggest 70 to 80 million people in addition to the people who live here are going to now have access to cannabis.”
That potential, Rivera said, already has existing license holders looking to invest in expanding their groves and adding more dispensaries.
As demand rises, so, too, does opportunity.
For the first time in five years, Florida state regulators said they will accept applications for up to 22 new medical marijuana licenses, doubling the size of the state’s industry. The state has allocated more funds for staffing for its Office of Medical Marijuana Use to keep up with a growing demand for medical marijuana.
In Florida, anyone who holds a license must control the product from creation to distribution to retail where someone with a medical marijuana card can buy it. Unlike other states, there is no limit on how many retail locations one license holder can open.
Companies now see opportunity to get a license and bet on the explosive growth and profits that legalized recreational use of cannabis could bring. The state will accept applications between April 24 and 28.
“People see an opportunity to build an infrastructure with a license for medical marijuana and then capitalize on it when recreational market opens,” said Dustin Robinson, founding partner of Mr. Cannabis Law in Fort Lauderdale. “When that happens, Florida could be the largest market in the world.”
Robinson said the application pool for the 22 licenses already appears competitive. He expects at least 50 applicants, possibly even 100. “There are a lot of people who want to get into the Florida markets but it is expensive to get in.”
Fake weed is everywhere
Floridians are getting sick and even dying from synthetic cannabis, fake weed that has made its way into the state. It can come in the form of solids or oils and contain unpredictable contaminants.
In December 2021, more than 50 people in the Tampa Bay area were hospitalized with severe bleeding after smoking synthetic cannabis products that may have been laced with rat poison.
Synthetic weed is illegal in Florida, and Christopher Kimball, Florida’s Director of the Office of Medical Marijuana Use, told lawmakers last week it is not being dispensed from licensed facilities. Yet data shows synthetic cannabis increasingly has led to ER visits in Florida, and a new report says it was a factor in two-thirds of cannabis deaths in the state between 2014 and 2020.
“It’s a real problem for the consumers,” said Sullivan of Cresco Labs. “What has happened because of the vagueness of the farm bill back in 2018 and interpretations of that, it’s created kind of a wild, wild west of unlicensed, untested, unregulated products flooding into states. A lot of local gas stations and cigarette shop are now carrying products that are unlicensed, untested and have real risk to consumers.”
One researcher says legalizing marijuana for adult use could curb some of the activity.
A review of National Poison Data System data collected between 2016 and 2019 found states with legalized recreational cannabis had 37% fewer poisoning reports for synthetic cannabinoids compared with states with restrictive laws.
“This study shows some potential public health benefits to the legalization and regulation of adult use of cannabis,” said co-author Tracy Klein of Washington State University.
Benefits vs. risk
The real thing, legally produced cannabis, has its health risks too.
Florida Atlantic University’s Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing just released a statewide analysis that shows cannabis can be addictive and potentially cause harm.
Researchers looked at deaths in Florida associated with cannabis. They used Florida Department of Law Enforcement data from 2014 to 2020 and discovered 386 people died in Florida as a result of cannabis use, mostly as a result of car accidents.
“People need to know marijuana use is not 100% safe or therapeutic,” said said Armiel Suriaga, Ph.D., senior author of the study and an assistant professor in FAU’s Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing. “It affects the brain and can impair judgment,”
Suriaga said he also found about 12.6% of deaths in Florida from cannabis involved cardiovascular-related illnesses. “It can trigger a heart attack because marijuana can cause inflammation of the heart.”
The Florida findings mirror larger scale research completed five years ago from 21 observational studies involving 240,000 participants.
William Checkley, who participated in that research on the health effects of recreational and therapeutic cannabis use, says a committee of experts found marijuana can help people with chronic pain and chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting. But it is not without risk.
“People who use cannabis prior to driving are 22% more likely to get into an accident,” he said.
Checkley, an associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, said his research also found a correlation with pot smoking and respiratory issues, and heavy users reported increased thoughts of suicide and depression.
Still, cannabis is one of the few industries in the world that grew during the pandemic, and in Florida, people continue to turn to it for help with their medical conditions.
