By Jeremy Duda | Arizona Mirror
Advocates of legalized marijuana are hoping to take the lessons they learned from their defeat in 2016 and put them to good use next year.
The campaign for a 2020 citizen initiative to legalize recreational marijuana in Arizona hopes to launch in late May or early June. Political consultant Stacy Pearson, whose firm is running the campaign, said that will give it a full year to collect signatures. The campaign must collect 237,645 valid signatures by July 2, 2020, to qualify for that year’s ballot.
A campaign committee, Smart and Safe Arizona, was formed in March. It has already reported bringing in a $100,000 contribution from a Tempe-based medical marijuana company.
The campaign is still finalizing the language for the initiative, and Pearson said the details are still being worked out. But the campaign is crafting the initiative with an eye toward negating some of the opposition’s talking points from 2016, when Proposition 205, dubbed the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol, lost by less than 3 percentage points.
