Anti-Cannabis Sponsor Gives Up the Fight in Montana
An anti-cannabis advocate in Montana has stated that he will give up on opposing medical cannabis on the November ballot, but will instead focus on an initiative to expand medical cannabis distribution.
According to the Associated Press for Yahoo, Steve Zabawa stated that there isn’t enough time to appeal to the Supreme Court in Montana before ballots are printed and distributed. His group, Safe Montana, has therefore decided to focus on defeating I-182, which would lighten the restrictions on distributing medical cannabis.
However, it seems that maybe his backing down was partially a way to cover up for failure. He made this decision after a District Judge denied his request to intervene with the initiative, and he fell 4,200 signatures short of support for his cause, which he attributes to signatures getting lost or improperly counted.
“Petitioners failed to introduce evidence that I-176 garnered the requisite number of verified signatures to be placed on the November 2016 ballot,” Judge Heidi Ulbricht’s official order stated. “Without the requisite number of verified signatures, the Secretary of State does not have a clear legal duty to place I-176 on the ballot.”
So far, Zabawa has spent $92,000 of his own money on trying to pass his own initiative and get rid of the one on the ballot. He also claims to have spent another $100,000 unofficially on audits and legal fees to try and recover the missing signatures. The judge denied his request to conduct an official search for the missing signatures.
Due to this failure, Zabawa now wants to focus on lobbying legislation in 2017 to pass a bill that would ban cannabis and all Schedule I drugs in Montana. He also plans to try another ballot initiative in 2018. While Zabawa has lost this battle, he clearly is not ready to give up the war.
