Mississippi: medical cannabis will be on the November 2020 ballot

Voters in Mississippi will be able to vote on the legalization of medical cannabis in the upcoming November election.

In September, the association Mississippians for Compassionate Care submitted 105,686 signatures to qualify Initiative 65 for the November 2020 election, enough to get the initiative on the ballot. Although only 86,000 signatures were required, each one had to be reviewed and approved by the Secretary of State’s Office. This process is now complete, and the initiative has been validated.

The Mississippi Legislature now has four months to review, amend, adopt, or reject the initiative before the next general election in November. In this context, lawmakers could decide to put their own amended version of the medical cannabis initiative on the ballot.

If that were the case, both the amended version and the original initiative would have to be put to a vote.

Meanwhile, the Mississippi Board of Health spoke out against this initiative. At a meeting in December 2019, the health board reviewed the pros and cons of medical cannabis. Although board members acknowledged the potential medical benefits of cannabis, the CBD and THC, they also noted that there are many known harmful effects associated with the use of cannabis-based products, including addiction, mental illness, an increase in accidents, and smoking-related health risks.

The council also felt that the proposed initiative allowed for very broad uses of medical cannabis—particularly under the category of «pain management»—and believed that it would give them no authority to restrict the consumption of edibles or THC.

For this and other reasons, members of the Mississippi State Board of Health expressed their «strong opposition» to the 2020 Medical Cannabis Legalization Initiative.

In 2020, 19 U.S. states could legalize the use of cannabis.