Medical marijuana patient advocate takes amendment petition off table until 2024

Arkansas medical marijuana patient advocate Melissa Fults has scrapped her recreational cannabis amendment petition in favor of waiting until 2024 and advocating against another recreational proposal in the meantime.

Fults filed the Arkansas Adult Use and Expungement Marijuana Amendment in November. In an interview last month, she said she wanted to focus her efforts on working against the Arkansas Adult Use Cannabis Amendment, which is backed by a ballot question committee funded largely by existing medical marijuana cultivators.

She has said she believes that amendment would allow large cultivators to profit while squeezing out the competition and jeopardize the medical program, and criticized it for not including an expungement provision for people with marijuana-related charges on their records.

Fults’ amendment would also allow for a number of cannabis businesses proportional to the state’s population, while the amendment backed by Responsible Growth Arkansas would first award cultivation and dispensary licenses to existing businesses.

Petitions must gather 89,151 signatures, or 10% of the total votes cast for governor in the 2018 general election, by July 8 to qualify for the November ballot. Fults said she didn’t feel she had sufficient time to get enough signatures before the deadline.

Responsible Growth Arkansas chairman Eddie Armstrong said criticism of the amendment is encouragement to work harder. He said the amendment would help patients by lowering prices while meeting demand, and that the amendment was developed by bringing industry groups and government leaders to the table.

He said the effort has gathered more than 50,000 valid signatures.

A spokeswoman for a third recreational marijuana effort, Arkansas True Grass, said it was likely that Arkansas Recreational Marijuana Amendment of 2022 would also be pushed back to 2024. That amendment would not cap the number of marijuana businesses and automatically release people who are incarcerated solely because of a marijuana-related charge.

Brian a Bo ling said Wednesday that the group would make a call by the end of the month and cited the difficulty of gathering signatures with a solely volunteer-driven effort.

Meanwhile, Responsible Growth Arkansas has raised more than $1.82 million and spent nearly $ 630,000 toward promoting the Arkansas Adult Use Cannabis Amendment, according to a report filed with the Arkansas Ethics Commission last month.