Those behind the campaign to legalize medical marijuana and some of its most vocal opponents have reached a tentative agreement on what medical marijuana policy should look like in Utah, the Deseret News reported.
Although it remains unclear whether the agreement means that those who oppose the November ballot initiative, Proposition 2, will continue to campaign against it, and just how aggressively those in favor will support it.
“We have come up with a few modifications of agreement, and we’ll be releasing those shortly, in the next day or two,” DJ Schanz, director of the Utah Patients Coalition said. He called the arrangement a “tentative agreement.”
Proposition 2 remains on the ballot and is not changed by the agreement from both sides; voters will say yes or no on Nov. 6. But the deal means both sides are seeking a legislative solution — a “Utah solution” — to medical marijuana regardless of the Election Day result.
Meanwhile, the results of the latest campaign filings are in and the results show that the Utah Patients Coalition is getting out-raised by their opponents but they’ve got far more individual backers.
Despite only fundraising for the last several months, the anti-medical marijuana activists have laid out large sums to defeat the initiative. The campaign filings showed that Drug Safe Utah received over a half million dollars, mostly from the real estate industry, according to the Cannabis Wire.
Drug Safe Utah is led by Walter J. Plumb a lawyer and investor who owns the pharmaceutical company Pharmics, Inc. and is closely connected to the Mormon Church which opposes legalized medical cannabis and was thought to be working behind the scenes to get Proposition 2 removed from the November ballot.
Drug Safe Utah, along with Plumb, have undertaken several lawsuits to keep the initiative from appearing on the ballot in November’s elections.
