Politics
Idaho Marijuana Campaign Works To Redraft Legalization Initiative In Response To Attorney General Review
Following a review by state officials last month, an Idaho campaign working to put a personal-use marijuana legalization initiative on the state’s 2026 ballot is readying a final version of the proposal, which it plans to file with the secretary of state next week.
The group Kind Idaho, which submitted a preliminary iteration of the noncommercial cannabis legalization proposal, is currently making adjustments to the measure’s text based on feedback from the state attorney general’s office.
“The big thing when it comes to something like this is we have the spirit of what we want,” Joe Evans, the treasurer and a lead organizer for the campaign told Marijuana Moment on Thursday. “We need to be able to get the letter to match the spirit.”
Evans said much of the official feedback was helpful and is being incorporated into the group’s final draft. In particular, he pointed to comments from the attorney general’s review involving other felony-level state laws that might conflict with legalization as well as how to be clear that the personal-use reform doesn’t create a commercial market.
“There are very legitimate concerns that the AG raises with regards to what is a felony and how do we decriminalize personal use without creating a new market,” he said. “So that’s our big focus right now, matching up letter to the spirit.”
He added that the campaign’s goal is to address the state’s identified issues “in a way that it can’t be abused by an overly aggressive or activist prosecutor or police officer.”
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 to voters.
As submitted, the proposal consisted 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.”
The comments returned by the attorney general office’s say the proposal’s lack of personal possession limit “would directly conflict with the following controlled substances felony laws,” pointing to laws barring “delivery” of any amount of marijuana, whether for sale or not, as well as anti-trafficking laws that prohibit possession of more than a certain threshold of cannabis plants or usable marijuana.
“In order to accommodate the new laws created by the Initiative, statutory exceptions to the above delivery and trafficking laws would have to be enacted,” the AG review says, noting that the “task involves more [than] this review can accommodate.”
The office also pointed out that because the measure “does not address whether children or adults under 21 years of age may be in proximity to, or contact with, marijuana,” the proposal in its current form “could negatively impact those under 21, especially children.”
Additionally, the review noted that while the consumption of marijuana wouldn’t be allowed in public under the proposal, the measure currently does not include “restrictions on where marijuana can be cultivated or produced.”
Once the final version of the measure is submitted to the state, officials will give it a formal ballot title and description, Evans said—a process that takes about 10 business days. He expects the campaign will begin gathering signatures shortly after that.
The deadline for submitting signatures is still some time away, in April 2026.
Organizers need to gather the roughly 70,000 valid voter signatures by then 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.
Under the state’s current laws prohibiting cannabis, general marijuana criminal cases in the state typically number about 4,000 per year, officials noted in measure’s review documents. About 1,500 of those cases result in convictions, although usually fewer than two dozen per year involve felony-level convictions.
In a recent interview with Marijuana Moment, Evans said organizers’ 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.”
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 the Idaho Attorney General Office’s and Secretary of State’s comments on the Kind Idaho proposal below:
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