Voters will decide whether or not recreational marijuana legalized

WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND — New Zealand is known for its tourism campaigns emphasizing what a clean, green country it is, and after 2020 it might be even greener: A referendum will be held that year on whether recreational cannabis use should be legal, the justice minister said Wednesday.

It appears that New Zealand would be the first country to put the issue to a nationwide vote.

Andrew Little, the justice minister, said the referendum would be on the ballot during the next national election, due to be held in 2020. He told reporters that the results would be binding, though he said there was “a bit of detail still to work through,” particularly regarding how the question would be worded.

The announcement came a week after New Zealand’s Parliament passed a law that will ease restrictions on medicinal marijuana.

Public opinion in New Zealand has become more supportive of recreational cannabis use in recent years. An October poll by 1 News found that 46 percent of those questioned favored legalizing the drug while 41 percent were against. The poll questioned 1,006 eligible voters and had a margin-of-sampling error of 3.1 percent.

Audrey Young, a veteran political commentator for the New Zealand Herald, said public opinion was moving “toward liberalization.”

“That’s because of two things — the advancement in the medicinal cannabis regime and the law just being passed, and also just that gathering sense of global opinion that the war on drugs is lost and that the health approach is the one to take,” she said.

If more than half of voters taking part in the referendum support legalization, New Zealand will join a handful of countries that have legalized marijuana use outright, including Canada and Uruguay; in the United States, several states have also legalized it. Dozens of other countries and states have decriminalized recreational use, legalized medicinal cannabis or eased enforcement of possession laws.

Figures from New Zealand’s Ministry of Health said that in 2015, about 8 percent of the people acknowledged having used cannabis in the previous year. Small-scale, personal use is largely ignored by the police, although as in the United States, studies have shown that minorities are more likely to be arrested and prosecuted for it.

New Zealand is known as being socially liberal, with previous governments having decriminalized prostitution and legalized samesex marriage. But neither of the two major parties, center-left Labour — which leads the current government — or center-right National, had previously been willing to touch the issue of recreational marijuana.

But Labour’s hand was forced in negotiations after the September 2017 election, during which neither major party won enough seats to govern outright. To win the support of the left-leaning Green Party — one of two parties that have given Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern the majority she needs to govern — Labour agreed to put cannabis legalization to a public vote.

“Politicians are the most risk-averse group of people that I have ever met,” said Chlöe Swarbrick, a Green Party lawmaker who has advocated legalizing cannabis.

There had not previously been “the will to invest in evidence-based policies” on controversial issues like marijuana, she said.

Swarbrick said the Green Party hoped the government would pass a law before the referendum that spelled out how legalization would work, giving “clarity and certainty about what New Zealanders are actually voting for.”

“It means we don’t end up with a Brexit-type situation when we’re trying to figure out what a ‘yes’ vote actually means,” she said.

TUKIRI CORNELL/THE NEW YORK TIMES Hemp plants grow in a nursery near Ruatoria, New Zealand. In 2020, a referendum will be held on whether the use of recreational marijuana should be legalized.