Politics
Idaho Activists File Petition To Put Marijuana Legalization On State’s 2026 Ballot
Marijuana activists in Idaho have now formally submitted paperwork to the secretary of state as part of an effort to qualify a noncommercial legalization initiative for the 2026 ballot.
“We are pursuing personal use and home cultivation decriminalization,” the campaign, Kind Idaho, announced in an email to supporters Tuesday, explaining that under the proposal, adults would not need to “register for a card, get a license to personal grow, go to a doctor to renew your prescription, and you get to choose what works best for you.”
“You should not need permission from the state for basic self-care,” the campaign email says. “You shouldn’t get in trouble over a plant.”
The new effort is a revised attempt at cannabis reform following years of unsuccessfully trying to legalize a more extensively regulated medical marijuana system in the state. Kind Idaho, which previously introduced medical marijuana ballot measures intended to go before voters in both the 2022 and 2024 elections, believes a more narrowly focused bill might be more palatable and require a less-intensive campaign lift.
The freshly submitted noncommercial legalization proposal consists primarily of two short paragraphs that would exempt marijuana “possession, production, or cultivation” from state drug laws provided that the cannabis is for personal use, is not consumed “in any public or open setting” and is not possessed by anyone under 21.
“Nothing in this section shall be construed to allow private or commercial sale or resale of any controlled substance,” it specifies, “nor transportation in quantities that exceed one ounce of plant or 1,000 mg of THC in other Marijuana derived or infused products.”
Submitting the petition begins a review process by the secretary of state’s office that Kind Idaho said Tuesday “will take at least” six weeks.
As of Monday, Joe Evans, the campaign’s treasurer, told Marijuana Moment in a separate email, the secretary of state “has 20 business days for legal review by the [state attorney general] and come back with recommendations.”
“After the 20 days, we have up to 15 business days to make modifications based on the AGs suggestions,” he added. “After that, it goes back to the SOS/AG for 10 business days for the title, short title, and long title. Once that is done, we can accept the titles provided, or sue for changes.”
Barring any major procedural hiccups, the campaign has said it should be able to begin gathering signatures on November 1. “That will give us 18 months before the deadline of April 30th [2026],” Evans said.
Organizers need to gather the roughly 70,000 valid voter signatures to put the measure on the 2026 ballot, though Idaho requires that campaigns also collect signatures representing at least 6 percent of registered voters in 18 of 35 legislative districts across the state.
In a recent interview with Marijuana Moment, Joe Evans, the campaign’s treasurer, said past efforts suffered from high costs and complicated regulatory provisions that weren’t always accessible to would-be supporters.
The most recent failed proposal, for example, was “seven pages, front and back,” Evans said, which meant not only that it cost several dollars just to print each signature-gathering form but also that it could be unwieldy to explain to voters when gathering signatures.
“It covered an entire medical program,” Evans said, describing it as a “wall of text” being presented to would-be supporters about the role of the state Department of Health and Human Services, the procedure for adding new qualifying conditions to the program and other details.
And while nearly 2 in 3 Idahoans support medical legalization, Evans noted—citing polling data from about two years ago—voters expressed concerns about state registration for medical patients under the program, which raised worries around gun ownership, child custody, privacy and other rights that might be curtailed.
“You know, what government watch list are you willing to get on in order to be able to use your medicine?” Evans said. “Are you willing to give up your guns to do it? Because that’s a real risk.”
For now, many people using marijuana in Idaho would rather “keep going across the border and buying recreationally,” Evans added, “and no one needs to know.”
The neighboring states of Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington all have legal adult-use marijuana, while medical marijuana is legal Utah.
The new, slimmed-down proposal is meant to ease both voters’ concerns and the process of implementation.
“We don’t have to go through the issue of creating a medical program,” Evans explained. “We don’t have to put a burden upon the medical field here in the state of Idaho by making them supervise quantities and qualities and dosages and all of that. We don’t invite the industry—whether medical or recreational marijuana—into the state, because we’re not actually legalizing resale. We’re just saying you can grow your own and you can be in possession of it, as long as you’re not planning on reselling it.”
The same two-year-old poll that showed majority support for medical legalization in the state showed even stronger backing for decriminalization, with about 8 in 10 voters in favor. Commercial legalization of marijuana for adults, by contrast, had only about 40 percent support in the earlier poll.
“They don’t want it sold here,” Evans said of Idaho voters. “They just don’t want people getting arrested for it.”
Evans, a military veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said previously that the noncommercial legalization measure is aimed at aligning “patient advocacy, survivor advocacy and even criminal justice advocacy.”
“We’re able to reduce the signature that cannabis has in our criminal justice system as well as be able to facilitate for our patients and survivors who need it in order to get the assistance and help they need,” Evans said, noting that about 6 in 10 people in state custody were put behind bars for drug offenses.
“Now, admittedly, not all of those are marijuana,” he added. “But this is one of those things [where] we can reduce the number of cannabis users who, through the process, acquire a police record.”
In 2021, a separate group of activists began gathering signatures for a similar ballot initiative that would have allowed adults to possess up to 3 ounces of marijuana on private property, though home cultivation would have been prohibited.
Though the measure didn’t make Idaho’s ballot, the idea was for consumers to be able to buy cannabis in neighboring states that have legal retail operations and then bring back the product to be consumed privately at home.
“All we’re asking [voters] to do is to accept what people were already doing: driving across the border legally purchasing marijuana and bringing it home to smoke,” organizer Russ Belville said at the time. “If Idaho still wants to give away the tax money, that’s fine. But we shouldn’t spend more tax money trying to arrest people in a futile attempt to stop them.”
Lawmakers in Idaho, meanwhile, have in recent months weighed ways to further tighten the state’s prohibition on marijuana.
A bill from Rep. Bruce Skaug (R) earlier this year, for example, would have set a $420 mandatory minimum fine for cannabis possession, removing judges’ discretion to apply lower penalties. Skaug said the bill, which ultimately stalled in committee, would send the message that Idaho is tough on marijuana.
House lawmakers also passed a bill to ban marijuana advertisements, though the Senate later defeated the measure.
As for Kind Idaho’s latest medical cannabis proposal, the campaign submitted initial paperwork for the initiative back in 2022, noting that the proposal was “essentially identical” to one the group filed two years earlier but which similarly failed to make the ballot.
Read a copy of Kind Idaho’s full petition, provided to Marijuana Moment by the campaign, below:
DEA Acknowledges New Two-Step Test For Marijuana’s Accepted Medical Use Is Legitimate
