Politics
Hope For Marijuana Legalization In New Hampshire Fades As Voters Elect Critical GOP Governor And Expand Republican Legislative Control
While marijuana legalization itself wasn’t on the ballot in New Hampshire this week, the results of Tuesday’s election—including the victory of Republican gubernatorial candidate Kelly Ayotte and expanded GOP majorities in the House and Senate—are widely expected to be a serious setback for cannabis reform in the Granite State.
Ayotte, a former U.S. senator and state attorney general who said repeatedly on the campaign trail that she would oppose efforts at adult-use legalization, has been projected winner of the governor’s race, capturing 53.5 percent of the vote as of Thursday morning, with more than 95 percent of precincts reporting. Democratic candidate Joyce Craig, the former mayor of Manchester and a supporter of legalization, earned 44.4 percent.
Republicans also added to their majority control of the state Senate in Tuesday’s elections, ousting Democratic Minority Leader Donna Soucy and Sen. Shannon Chandley (D), both of whom backed plans to legalize.
Meanwhile, a number of races in New Hampshire’s 400-member House of Representatives are still too close to call.
Matt Simon, director of public and government relations at the medical marijuana provider GraniteLeaf, said the election results are likely to delay comprehensive legalization in New Hampshire for years—though he left the door open for Ayotte to revise her views on the issue.
“New Hampshire will definitely legalize cannabis someday,” Simon said. “The odds of that happening in the next biennium do not appear great.”
“The path to legalization now requires convincing Kelly Ayotte to support some version of legalization—which is possible—or to somehow get two thirds majorities in both chambers, which seems like a long shot at this point,” he added, referring to the supermajority threshold required to override a governor’s veto.
State lawmakers nearly passed legislation this past session that would have legalized and regulated marijuana for adults. The Republican-sponsored measure—one that outgoing Gov. Chris Sununu (R) said he’d support—had bipartisan support in both legislative chambers, but House Democrats narrowly voted to table it at the last minute.
Tabling the legislation sparked accusations that politicians were using the issue to earn the party votes at the ballot box, but most who voted against the bill at the time said they were opposed to the plan on its merits, pointing to the proposal’s state-controlled franchise model, which would have given the state unprecedented sway over retail stores and consumer prices.
While Sununu hesitantly supported legalization, Ayotte has spent recent months disparaging the idea. After Craig proposed using state tax revenue from legalization to fund education and housing, for example, Ayotte came out swinging.
“Joyce Craig can smoke her way to a balanced budget, but I’m going to do it the old-fashioned way,” Ayotte said at the time. “We’re going to live within our means.”
Simon, at GraniteLeaf, noted that Ayotte has long been a critic of ending prohibition. “Certainly throughout her career she has not supported any cannabis policy reform, from medical to decrim to adult-use legalization. She has, up to this point, been opposed to all of it,” he said.
At the same time, he added: “I would not rule out the possibility that she can be persuaded.”
“I’ve been working on this issue for 18 years, and I’ve seen countless politicians move from no to some form of yes—and almost none the other direction,” Simon continued.
He said that within New Hampshire’s Republican Party, there seems to be sharp divisions on marijuana policy. How elected officials navigate that disagreement remains to be seen.
“It’s really going to be on the Republicans if they want to evolve or not,” Simon said, noting that there are “multiple camps under the GOP tent” when it comes to stances on cannabis.
“As we saw in the last biennium, there was the prohibitionist camp, there was the state-control camp and there was the prefer-a-free-market camp,” he said. “Kelly Ayotte has always been in the first of those camps. That doesn’t mean she’s not capable of moving into one of the other camps.”
One possibility, Simon speculated, is that lawmakers will pivot away from pursuing a comprehensive that would legalize and regulate marijuana, instead focusing on legalizing cannabis merely for personal use. He pointed out that Rep. Jared Sullivan (D), a legalization supporter, has requested two versions of legalization legislation be drafted for the coming session: one bill that would legalize and regulate a commercial cannabis industry and another that would merely legalize personal possession and use.
(Disclosure: Simon supports Marijuana Moment’s work through a monthly Patreon pledge.)
Sullivan, in an email to Marijuana Moment on Thursday, acknowledged that he’s working on both bills.
“They are unlikely to pass [and] become law,” the lawmaker said, “but at least the conversation will continue.”
Ayotte’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Another possible approach is that lawmakers will focus less on adult-use legalization in the coming years and instead aim to improve or expand the state’s existing medical marijuana program. That’s according to Daryl Eames, founder of the New Hampshire Cannabis Association (NHCANN), who said the most likely outcome of the election is “a pivot to other efforts other than full out recreational legalization.”
Eames said adjustments to rules around medical marijuana operators—known in New Hampshire as alternative treatment centers (ATCs)—could include allowing the organizations to transition from their current nonprofit status to for-profit businesses or allowing outdoor cultivation. (ATCs must currently cultivate all cannabis indoors. Lawmakers this year passed a bill that would have allowed outdoor grows in greenhouses, but Sununu vetoed the legislation.)
He said Rep. Wendy Thomas (D), who sponsored a number of medical marijuana-related reforms last session, would likely take the lead on those matters. Thomas, reached by email Wednesday, said she was not ready to discuss cannabis strategy.
“Soon I will meet with other legislators to figure out what path we are going to take with regard to cannabis,” she told Marijuana Moment. “Until then, I’m sorry, but I have nothing to give you.”
While Ayotte has flatly opposed cannabis legalization in the Granite State, her opponent, Craig, had been largely supportive of adult-use cannabis legalization in the run-up to the election. During a debate hosted by New Hampshire Public Radio last month, for example, she said she’d back a legalization model that “supports our small businesses, our local farmers, and that provides local control.”
“Obviously has to be properly regulated and labeled,” she said at the time, “and I would suggest that the revenues that we receive from this be put toward public education and affordable housing, two things that we need to focus on over the next few years.”
During an earlier interview with legalization advocates, Craig said she opposed putting the Liquor Commission at the helm of the cannabis industry, instead favoring smaller, private businesses run by local owners. The Democrat, who toured a marijuana businesses just days before the election, also said she believes the state should move quickly to establish its own cannabis industry before the federal government opens state borders to cannabis commerce and favors a legalization structure that disincentivizes large or multi-state operators dominating New Hampshire’s market.
Granite Staters broadly support enacting legalization, with polling earlier this year support for legalization generally at about 65 percent. A separate poll released this summer showed 61 support among residents for the bill that nearly became law this past year.
In light of public support, Simon at GraniteLeaf said he’s surprised politicians still defend outlawing marijuana.
“Polls are still the polls. Public opinion is still public opinion. We’re still surrounded by legal sources of cannabis,” he said, noting that every state bordering New Hampshire has legalized marijuana for adults. “What do we really achieve by punishing adults for possessing it?”
Before this past year’s bill fizzled out, New Hampshire lawmakers worked extensively on marijuana legalization in 2023, working toward a compromise that would enact the reform through a multi-tiered system that would include state-controlled shops, dual licensing for existing medical cannabis dispensaries and businesses privately licensed to individuals by state agencies. The legislature ultimately hit an impasse on the complex legislation, however.
Bicameral lawmakers also convened a state commission tasked with studying legalization and proposing a path forward last year, though the group ultimately failed to arrive at a consensus or propose final legislation.
Since the end of this year’s regular legislative session, Sununu did approve some more minor marijuana reforms. Perhaps most notably, he signed into a law a significant medical marijuana expansion bill to allow doctors to recommend cannabis for any debilitating condition they believe it would improve. Previously, patients needed to be diagnosed with certain specific conditions to qualify for legal marijuana access.
Enactment of that measure came after the governor signed two other medical marijuana expansion bills: one that added generalized anxiety disorder as a qualifying condition and another that allowed more healthcare providers to certify patients for the state’s medical marijuana program.
Separately, a New Hampshire House committee last month declined to move forward with a bill that would have established a state-regulated therapeutic psychedelic program modeled after the current medical marijuana system, but members of the panel generally agreed that lawmakers should pursue future legislation to expand legal access to substances like psilocybin and LSD.
But for now, lawmakers said, the state isn’t ready to legalize and regulate entheogens that remain federally illegal.
This story has been updated with a comment from Rep. Jared Sullivan.
Photo courtesy of Philip Steffan.
