2021 elections were another winning night for drugs, but not in Iowa

Drugs keep racking up W’s in the government’s War on Drugs.

After a historic winning night for drug reform on Election Day 2020, voters in a few more jurisdictions signed off on ballot measures to ease drug laws in this past week’s off-year elections. Meanwhile in Iowa, where the people have no ability to put issues on the ballot, drugs remain highly illegal.

The question now in Iowa is which is more durable — Republicans’ legislative majorities or their opposition to drug reform?

This past Tuesday in Detroit, voters approved a ballot initiative calling to decriminalize adult therapeutic use of “entheogenic plants,” which includes psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin mushrooms and ayahuasca, Marijuana Moment reported. A growing number of cities and states are working toward lifting restrictions on hallucinogenic drugs that have potentially powerful mental health benefits and carry a lower risk of physical harm than many other substances.

In Philadelphia, voters passed a referendum to demand marijuana legalization from the state government. While the ballot measure is non-binding, it could put pressure on policymakers in Pennsylvania, which now stands with Texas as the most populous states still criminalizing marijuana.

In Colorado — where recreational marijuana has been legal for almost a decade under a voter-approved constitutional amendment — voters defeated a ballot item that would have hiked taxes on marijuana. It’s an encouraging signal that marijuana freedom is important for its own merits, not just as a scheme to generate state revenue.

And marijuana went .500 in Ohio, where voters in some cities approved local ballot issues to decriminalize marijuana while others rejected them. That’s a helpful reminder to cautious Iowa policymakers that drug policy is not all or nothing — they could give local governments the authority to set their own enforcement priorities.

Many Iowans understandably get ballot envy looking at these pro-drug election results from elsewhere. Why can’t we have nice things like those other states have?

Citizens in about half the states have the ability to petition for issues to be put up for a vote, but not Iowa.

Many states — including Iowa’s neighboring South Dakota, Nebraska and Missouri — give their people broad authority to directly influence state law. Voters there can petition to make constitutional amendments, codify new laws and strike down existing ones.

Iowa has no such process. The only way for voters to directly weigh in on state policy is for lawmakers to propose a constitutional amendment, a lengthy and politically challenging process that requires at least two years of legislative work leading to a statewide vote.

There are signs that the GOP resistance to pot is weakening. This year in the Legislature, a Republican-controlled Senate committee advanced a bill to reduce first-time marijuana possession to a simple misdemeanor, which potentially would allow local governments to further reduce penalties. The bill never saw floor votes in either chamber.

Reducing marijuana charges would bring Iowa closer in line with national trends but we still would be a long way from a workable drug policy.

As Iowa law sits unchanged, public opinion is moving strongly in favor of freedom. Gallup Poll data out this week shows more than two-thirds of Americans support legal marijuana, including 50 percent of Republicans.

The question now in Iowa is which is more durable — Republicans’ legislative majorities or their opposition to drug reform?

(319) 339-3156; adam.sullivan@thegazette.com