Since Arizona legalized medical hashish in 2010, greater than 300,000 residents of the state have been authorized as medical sufferers. Businesses have stored up: Total annual gross sales grew to greater than $1 billion final 12 months, and greater than 20,000 individuals work within the state’s hashish business, based on Leafly, a commerce publication.
But for years, there’s been resistance to increasing the authorized market. In truth, just some years in the past, Arizona voted towards legalizing leisure marijuana.
In 2016, a group of conservative donors banded collectively to oppose Proposition 205, which might just do that. They included the proprietor of Discount Tire, a nationwide tire and wheel firm headquartered in Scottsdale; the opioid producer Insys Therapeutics, whose founder was sentenced to five and a half years in prison in 2020; and Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino and hotel developer who died in January.
Those in assist of legalization included the Marijuana Policy Project, a company that works to reform legal guidelines round marijuana, and Dr. Bronner’s, a cleaning soap firm. Though each side had tens of millions of {dollars} in donations behind them, legalization misplaced by less than three percent of the vote.
“For a while, we just licked our wounds,” stated Steve White, the chief govt of Harvest Health & Recreation Inc. They additionally fortified their warfare chests. “In 2016, we just weren’t capable of raising enough money ourselves,” Mr. White stated.
For the 2020 marketing campaign, referred to as “Smart and Safe Arizona,” his firm donated $1.eight million, becoming a member of Curaleaf and Copperstate Farms, two different hashish corporations, as main traders. Along with different donors, they employed Strategies 360, a public affairs agency in Seattle that ran a successful 2016 campaign to unseat Joe Arpaio, the anti-immigration crusader who as soon as despatched a team to Hawaii to gather Barack Obama’s beginning certificates, from his 24-year tenure because the Sheriff of Maricopa County.
