Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston determined Sept. 30 that there weren’t enough signatures for a medical cannabis expansion amendment to land on the November ballot, but on Oct. 2 the state’s Supreme Court ordered his office to keep on counting.
Sponsoring the proposed measure, Arkansans for Patient Access (APA) submitted 111,402 signatures on July 5 and an additional 38,933 signatures on Aug. 30, for a 30-day cure period, totaling more than 150,000 signatures, according to the group.
However, Thurston’s office announced earlier this week that state officials determined only 88,040 signatures were valid (roughly 58% of the total), leaving APA 2,664 signatures short of a statewide threshold required to land the constitutional amendment on the 2024 ballot.
Two days later, the Arkansas Supreme Court ordered Thurston’s office to continue counting an additional roughly 18,000 signatures that state officials previously decided were insufficient due to a paperwork issue, Little Rock Public Radio reported.
“The Arkansas secretary of state is ordered to immediately begin verifying the (~18,000) remaining signatures submitted during the cure period until the 90,704 threshold or just beyond is met,” according to the Oct. 2 court order.
The court also ordered Thurston to file a report and notice of compliance by noon on Oct. 4.
The order is part of a lawsuit that the APA filed Oct. 1, challenging Thurston’s decision to void nearly half of the signatures submitted for the cure period over paperwork filing requirements.
In August, the secretary of state’s office also blocked signatures for an abortion rights ballot measure from being counted over similar claims that organizers filed improper paperwork for paid signature collectors that weren’t bundled in compliance with state law, The Associated Press reported.
In that case, the Supreme Court ruled in a 4-3 decision that Thurston correctly refused to count the signatures collected by paid canvassers because the sponsor failed to file the paid canvasser training certification. The decision came despite the abortion rights organizers’ claim that the same standard wasn’t applied to previous petitions.
The denied signatures from APA’s medical cannabis expansion petition also stem from paid canvassers whom the sponsor hired during the campaign. Specifically, APA employed Nationwide Ballot Access to recruit, qualify, hire and train paid canvassers to gather signatures on behalf of APA.
However, on Aug. 8, the state secretary’s office sent a letter to APA that Nationwide Ballot Access submitting sworn affidavits from the paid canvassers on behalf of APA no longer complied with state law during the cure period, despite Thurston’s office previously accepting at least 112 signature submissions from Nationwide Ballot Access previous to the cure period, according to the APA lawsuit.
“APA continued to gather signatures from Arkansas voters in the same manner that had occurred for the signatures it submitted on July 5,” the lawsuit states. “Events to this point had proceeded normally and as previous initiative and referendum efforts had been conducted by sponsors, the secretary of state and the attorney general for years. Unfortunately, things were to become anything but normal.”
APA attorney Stephen Lancaster argued in a 16-page complaint filed Oct. 1 with the Supreme Court that the group relied on both statutory language and practices the secretary of state’s office had followed for many election cycles and that the APA had no prior notice of Thurston’s new position.
Notably, Chief Justice Dan Kemp and Associate Justice Courtney Hudson recused themselves from the lawsuit, The Arkansas Times reported. Both justices offered dissenting opinions in the abortion rights ruling.
The recusals mean Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has taken an anti-legalization position in Arkansas, will be charged with appointing “special associate justices” to replace Kemp and Hudson on the APA lawsuit. This executive privilege under Arkansas law comes despite Sanders opposing the APA proposal via her adviser heading a group attempting to defeat the measure.
Nonetheless, the APA’s medical cannabis amendment will still appear on the statewide ballot as Issue 3 this November, because the signature verification process remained in progress on Aug. 22, the deadline for election officials to finalize candidates and issues before printing the ballots.
However, it’s now up to the state’s Supreme Court to decide whether the votes for Issue 3 will count on Election Day.
The proposed amendment intends to build upon Arkansas’ medical cannabis legalization measure from 2016 (Amendment 98) by allowing home grows, reducing card renewal burdens for patients, increasing qualifying conditions, updating industry regulations, and expanding health care provider eligibility to recommend medical cannabis.
Among numerous provisions, the 2024 initiative would amend the state constitution to:
Allow medical cannabis patients and caregivers 21 and older in Arkansas to grow up to 14 plants (seven mature) at home for personal use;Allow all health care practitioners, including osteopathic doctors, physician assistants, nurse practitioners and pharmacists, to certify patients;Allow health care practitioners to recommend medical cannabis to patients for any debilitating condition rather than limiting patients to 18 qualifying conditions;Allow patients to receive telemedicine assessments for their medical cannabis recommendations, removing a physician-patient relationship requirement;Allow reciprocity for non-Arkansas residents to apply for and receive registry identification cards in the same way as Arkansas residents for the state’s medical cannabis program;Extend the expiration date for registry identification cards from one to three years and eliminate card application fees;Remove and replace advertising restrictions with restrictions for dispensaries, processors, and cultivation facilities narrowly tailored to prevent advertising and packaging from appealing to children;Require the Alcoholic Beverage Control Division to make rules that require packaging that cannot be opened by a child or that prevents “ready access to toxic or harmful amounts” of the product;Define “usable marijuana” as cannabis and other substances, including all parts of the plant Cannabis sativa, whether growing or not, including any seeds, resin, compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, isomer or preparation of the plant, including THC and all other derivatives, and to exclude hemp with a delta-9 THC concentration of not more than 0.3% on a dry-weight basis; and Allow cultivation facilities to sell cannabis in any form to dispensaries, processors or other cultivation facilities.
In addition, the proposed amendment would allow adults 21 and older to possess up to 1 ounce of cannabis flower, as well as licensed cultivation and retail facilities to grow and sell adult-use, cannabis should federal law prohibiting those activities change.
Under Arkansas’ current medical cannabis program, there are nearly 107,000 active patient cards, or roughly 1 per 29 residents (3.5% of the state’s population), as of Sept. 28, according to the state’s Department of Health. The most prevalent qualifying condition among medical cannabis patients in fiscal 2023 was post-traumatic stress disorder, with 34.2% of qualifying patients listing this condition, according to the department.
Since the state launched medical cannabis sales in May 2019, licensed dispensaries have sold more than $1.2 billion in cannabis, Scott Hardin, communications director with the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration, told Cannabis Business Times.
The order comes after Secretary of State John Thurston determined a petition to expand the state’s medical cannabis program was insufficient. Read More