The Republican governor of Florida is conceding that “more people probably agreed” with a marijuana legalization ballot initiative he helped defeat last year than sided with his prohibitionist viewpoint—but he argued that it was the “morally right” choice for him to intervene to prevent the sale of “dangerous stuff” in his state.
At an event hosted by the Pennsylvania Family Institute on Saturday, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) talked about his administration’s uphill work to dissuade voters from approving both the cannabis measure as well as a separate reproductive rights initiative during the November 2024. While both initiatives received majority support from voters, they failed to meet the state’s high 60 percent threshold required to enact constitutional amendments.
In the speech, DeSantis claimed that the marijuana proposal, Amendment 3, wouldn’t just have legalized cannabis but also made it a “constitutional right to possess and smoke it, including in public,” while giving one company in particular “a lot of benefits,” seemingly referring to the Smart and Safe Florida campaign’s largest financier Trulieve.
“Somehow you got people that are going to spend a lot of money to basically make us California through the back door with these initiatives and these amendments,” DeSantis said. “The marijuana people spent $150 million on this. The abortion people spent $130 million. So we had to contend with $280 million of spending on very misleading language—and, let’s just be honest, they were pushing issues in which probably more people agreed with them than agreed with me or agreed with us.”
“Marijuana was somewhat popular,” the governor said in comments first reported by Florida Politics. “I didn’t do it to be popular. I did it because it was the right thing to do. So we were having to deal with navigating all this.”
Despite raising money to finance ads opposing the cannabis measure, DeSantis said governors don’t officially “have a role in these amendments.” He faulted “special interest” parties and the state Supreme Court approval of the initiative language that he described as a “mistake.”
“I mean, most people that get elected in my positions like mine, all their advisors say, ‘stay away from this. There’s nothing for you to gain by getting involved in this. All you’re going to do is alienate supporters,'” he said. “And that may be true, but that also wouldn’t be the right thing to do. It wouldn’t be the morally right thing to do. So I was in a position. I had this platform as governor. I had a megaphone. There were things being proposed that would be harmful for my state.”
“In terms of the marijuana, I mean, you can’t function as a state if you smell marijuana everywhere—if these kids are doing it,” DeSantis said. “And this isn’t the marijuana they had in Woodstock. This is really, really dangerous stuff, so it would have been terrible for Florida.”
“We dug in. We barnstormed the state. We made the case to the people of Florida, and we were the first state not just to defeat an abortion, but also marijuana—and we did it in the same year, in the same election, against $280 million,” he said.
Cannabis reform enjoys majority support in Florida, according to multiple polls that led up to a vote on an adult-use legalization ballot initiative last year. It ultimately fell short of the steep 60 percent threshold for passage, and part of the opposition came from the Florida Police Chiefs Association (FPCA) and the Florida Sheriffs Association (FSA).
Advocates are now working on a new cannabis initiative that they hope to place on Florida’s 2026 ballot. As of this summer, the renewed legalization campaign has collected more than 75 percent of the required signatures to put the marijuana measure before voters next year, according to state officials.
DeSantis said in February that the newest proposal is in “big time trouble” with the state Supreme Court, predicting it will be blocked from going before voters next year.
Smart & Safe Florida is hoping the revised version will succeed in 2026. The campaign—which in the last election cycle received tens of millions of dollars from cannabis industry stakeholders, principally the multi-state operator Trulieve—incorporated certain changes into the new version that seem responsive to criticism opponents raised during the 2024 push.
For example, it now specifically states that the “smoking and vaping of marijuana in any public place is prohibited.”Another section asserts that the legislature would need to approve rules dealing with the “regulation of the time, place, and manner of the public consumption of marijuana.”