One Sunday earlier this month, Dave Portnoy ordered a pizza, plopped down on his sofa to observe soccer, and lit a blunt. He was indignant. The Barstool Sports activities founder, who’s beloved by many right-leaning younger males, was in his mansion in Massachusetts, the place he might legally smoke weed “like a human,” as he mentioned in a video posted on X. However he can’t do this at his house in Miami. “Freedom. It’s about freedom,” Portnoy mentioned, encouraging viewers to vote sure on an modification that might legalize leisure hashish in Florida, earlier than blowing smoke into the digital camera.
If Florida passes the modification, the state would turn into one thing of an aberration. Though 24 different states have already got authorized pot on the books, simply 4 of them voted for Donald Trump in 2020: Alaska, Missouri, Ohio, and Montana. Many prime Republicans stay vehemently towards authorized weed, warning that the drug brings dysfunction and well being dangers, particularly as marijuana has turn into stronger. Earlier this 12 months, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin vetoed a invoice permitting the sale of weed, making a declare that leisure marijuana is linked to “elevated gang exercise and violent crime”—a hyperlink that researchers are nonetheless divided over. Senator J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, has additionally repeatedly expressed that he’s towards legalization.
However the measure in Florida has the assist of the state’s most well-known Republican. Trump posted on Reality Social earlier this month that he can be voting for the initiative. “I imagine it’s time to finish unnecessary arrests and incarcerations of adults for small quantities of marijuana for private use,” he wrote. Polls recommend that the referendum is hovering only a tick above the 60 p.c threshold it must move and subsequently enshrine in Florida’s structure the proper to own, buy, and use marijuana. It’s not a positive factor, but when it does certainly undergo, the choice can be “an extremely vital concession for American conservatism,” Allan Lichtman, a historian at American College, advised me. Florida might find yourself turning into a tipping level for the remainder of the Republican Social gathering.
When Florida acts, different conservative states hear. Below Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida has positioned itself as an antidote to blue America. One week after New York introduced its COVID “vaccine passport” in 2021, DeSantis issued an order banning native companies from requiring proof of immunization. Different crimson states, together with Texas, Georgia, and Alabama, adopted go well with. And after Florida enacted its “Don’t Say Homosexual” regulation in March 2022, greater than a dozen states launched related payments governing the instructing of sexual orientation in faculties. “Florida has been proper on the epicenter of the tradition conflict that’s been so vital for Republicans lately,” Lichtman mentioned.
With authorized weed, Florida has not escaped the tradition wars. DeSantis has remained vehemently towards the measure, even after Trump’s endorsement, as has the state Republican Social gathering, which has mentioned that legalization would “INSTANTLY make Florida extra blue.” The state authorized medical marijuana in 2016, and Florida’s largest medical-marijuana dispensary has spent tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to wrangle the almost 900,000 signatures required to get the referendum on the poll in November. The DeSantis administration appealed to the state’s supreme court docket in an unsuccessful try and get the initiative struck from the poll.
DeSantis’s place is aligned with the GOP’s total message on marijuana, which has stayed pretty constant even because the occasion has flipped on many different points. In any case, Richard Nixon led the Struggle on Medication, Ronald Reagan declared marijuana “most likely probably the most harmful drug in the USA,” and each Presidents Bush performed huge enforcement sweeps to sign that the federal authorities wouldn’t loosen its prohibitionist stance. For his half, Trump mentioned in 2015 that leisure marijuana is “unhealthy, and I really feel strongly about that.” He has bragged that he’s by no means touched the stuff. As president, he additionally claimed to have donated one among his paychecks to fund a public-health marketing campaign towards the drug. At instances, nevertheless, he has additionally mentioned that states ought to resolve whether or not or to not legalize.
However Republican voters are regularly breaking away from the occasion’s hard-line stance. A slim majority are actually in favor of legalization, in keeping with Gallup, which has tracked People’ views on marijuana yearly since 1969. Republicans’ newfound assist is as a lot a matter of age as of politics. Not like the primary state occasion, the Florida Younger Republicans group known as legalization “the apparent selection.”
If Florida finally ends up turning into a weed trendsetter for Republicans, it wouldn’t be the primary time. One thing related occurred with medical marijuana: By the point legalization got here to Florida, many blue states had already green-lit their very own medical-marijuana packages. However Florida was the primary state within the South to dispense medical marijuana. Within the subsequent few years, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana adopted. If Florida passes the brand new measure, it might current “a notable marker on this sample that we now have seen,” Joanne Spetz, the director of the Institute for Well being Coverage Research at UC San Francisco, advised me.
A part of that diffusion of medical marijuana was influenced by extra conservative states studying from the expertise of extra liberal ones, and designing their packages to be extra palatable to a inhabitants that doesn’t need to see beachfront pot docs promoting medical playing cards to each vacationer with a headache. In crimson states, medical-marijuana packages “are usually extra restrictive” than in blue states, Daniel Mallinson, a public-policy professor at Penn State Harrisburg, advised me. The identical might maintain for leisure marijuana. Whether or not states comply with Florida’s lead would possibly come down as to if the state can implement legalization in a manner that concurrently fulfills the desire of the voters and doesn’t make retirees within the Villages lament that they’ve abruptly been transported to Denver. Put merely: It’d come all the way down to the odor.
“I don’t need each resort to essentially odor,” DeSantis warned at a press convention in early March. It’s a priority shared by Trump himself, who final month posted that Florida should be sure that “we don’t odor marijuana all over the place we go, like we do in most of the Democrat run Cities.” New York Republicans have launched laws to ban marijuana smoking in public in response to New Yorkers being “usually assailed with the pungent odor of marijuana on public sidewalks, in parking tons and different public areas”—which even Democratic Mayor Eric Adams acknowledged is pervasive. And Vance opposed his personal state’s legalization efforts, as a result of “I need to have the ability to do regular issues with out being slammed within the face with the odor of weed.”
After all, most states with authorized marijuana additionally limit public consumption of the drug, however enforcement is commonly spotty. Florida is just not precisely identified for successfully stopping public dysfunction. It’s the state that has made headlines for Disney World patrons making an attempt to steal a golf cart, annual spring-break riots, and males who danger hazard with alligators (whether or not it’s throwing a gator by a drive-thru window or stealing one from a mini-golf course).
Even when Florida enters a brand new period of reefer insanity and manages to by some means preserve the Disney World vacationers, spring breakers, and “Florida males” calm, not each crimson state will shortly comply with go well with; voters in Oklahoma and Arkansas voted towards legalization lately. Nonetheless, Florida’s measure might be a win for conservatives—even those who’re anti-weed. They’re proper: Marijuana might be addictive, and pot smoke stinks. However the established order—one wherein marijuana is banned on the federal stage—retains the drug in a grey space that stops it from being studied on college campuses and controlled by the FDA. Sure, legalization would possibly imply Republicans odor weed on road corners, nevertheless it might additionally permit for extra analysis into the consequences of marijuana, and extra regulation of the place and when the drug can be utilized.
Till a crucial mass of crimson states embraces leisure weed, it’s laborious to see something altering. Florida can not carry all the Republican Social gathering alongside in a single day, however maybe someday quickly, Dave Portnoy and his “stoolies” in Florida can legally order pizza, watch soccer, and smoke a joint on the sofa.