Activists want recreational marijuana on Arizona ballot in November

Activists with Safer Arizona, a grassroots marijuana advocacy group, are trying to collect enough signatures to put a legalization initiative on the November ballot, reports TucsonSentinel.com. Dennis Bohlke, treasurer for Safer Arizona, said Arizona would be a safer place if marijuana were legalized. But is Arizona, several years removed from narrowly approving medical marijuana, ready to follow the lead of Colorado and Washington by trying to legalize recreational use?

Will Arizona follow the lead of states such as Colorado in legalizing recreational marijuana use? One Arizona group is launching a grassroots movement to get the issue on the November ballot. When Scott Cecil wound up facing a felony charge for possessing marijuana for his own use, he started to think the so-called war on drugs was targeting the wrong people. “It really made me realize there are hundreds of thousands of people per year that are arrested for marijuana and other drugs,” he said. “They haven’t committed any violent crimes, they aren’t selling drugs, they’re just using drugs recreationally.”

Cecil, a student at Mesa Community College and board member of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, is part of a larger movement to legalize marijuana in Arizona. He and other activists with Safer Arizona, a grassroots marijuana advocacy group, are trying to collect enough signatures to put a legalization initiative on the November ballot.

Dennis Bohlke, treasurer for Safer Arizona, said Arizona would be a safer place if marijuana were legalized. “We think it’s safer than alcohol, and we find it outrageous that people are being jailed and being labeled as felons,” he said. But is Arizona, several years removed from narrowly approving medical marijuana, ready to follow the lead of Colorado and Washington by legalizing recreational use?

Fred Solop, a political science professor at Northern Arizona University, said there may be more support out there than many would assume. “I’ve always said that Arizona is a lesson in contradictions,” he said. “We know that some issues that are aligned ideologically in other parts of the country, like the environment, cut across some of those traditional ideological boundaries in Arizona. And I think depending on the framing, the marijuana issue cuts across those traditional cleavages as well.”

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