A campaign to repeal Arizona’s legal cannabis law ends as its sponsor says concerns about industry marketing to children were overstated.
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The sponsor of a proposed ballot initiative to repeal recreational marijuana legalization in Arizona has abandoned the effort, saying he has “adjusted my viewpoints on the threat to kids.” Sean Noble told reporters that he is dropping his planned ballot measure, which would have repealed the 2020 initiative that legalized the possession, sale and use of cannabis by adults aged 21 and over.
Noble, the founder of the conservative organization American Encore, told Capitol Media Services that the legalization repeal initiative was not aimed at medical marijuana. Instead, the effort was focused on the legalization of recreational cannabis and perceived abuses by the industry, including the marketing of marijuana products to children.
“I went into it with a pretty profound belief that it was happening,” he said this week, although he admitted he did not have personal knowledge of improper marketing. “I was kind of relying on things that I had seen or read from other people.”
A common element to these proposals is a professed urgency to protect children from legal weed. But Adam J. Smith, executive director of the cannabis reform advocacy group Marijuana Policy Project, says that evidence indicates that regulating cannabis keeps young people safer.
“For decades, Prohibitionists have made hysterical claims that legal, regulated cannabis markets put kids at risk, but the facts, as Sean Noble notes, have not borne that out,” Smith writes in an electronic message. “According to the CDC, teen use is at or near its lowest point in 50 years, despite more than half of Americans now residing in legal states, and down in 19 of the 21 legal states for which we have data. And according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse’s Monitoring the Future survey, the number of 8th and 10th graders who say that cannabis is ‘easy’ or ‘fairly easy’ to obtain has been cut in half since states began legalizing adult use in 2012.”
Smith notes that legal cannabis is age-gated, requiring retailers to check a patron’s identification every time. And unlike unlicensed dealers who will often sell to anyone with the money to buy, the livelihoods of regulated licensees depend on preventing cannabis sales to kids. He also commends Noble for ending his repeal effort, noting that recent legislation further protects consumers and children with strict labeling requirements and a ban on marketing aimed at kids.
“Kudos to Sean Noble for taking a look at the facts before setting off to end adult use sales, pushing the AZ market back into the hands of illicit sellers,” he writes. “Licensed, regulated producers and retailers do NOT market to children, and as AZ's recently passed law shows, must meet strict labeling and advertising requirements to avoid this.”
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