Marijuana Moment: Florida Attorney General Asks Supreme Court To Block Marijuana Legalization Measure From Ballot

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The attorney general of Florida and several business and anti-marijuana groups are telling the state Supreme Court to block a cannabis legalization initiative, calling it “fatally flawed” and unconstitutional as advocates work against the clock to qualify the measure for the November ballot.

In a series of briefs submitted to the court on Friday, Attorney General James Uthmeier (R), Drug Free America Foundation, Florida Chamber of Commerce, Florida Legal Foundation, Associated Industries of Florida and a former judge made similar arguments contesting the initiative from Smart and Safe Florida.

The parties generally contend that the proposal is written in a way that’s affirmatively misleading, runs counter to federal law prohibiting cannabis and violates the state’s single subject rule for ballot initiatives.

The attorney general called the measure “fatally flawed,” arguing that it “misleads voters in a way designed to garner greater approval, is flatly invalid under the federal Constitution, and violates the single-subject requirement. The Court should therefore strike the proposed amendment from the ballot.”

Each of those reasons alone, the brief said, “warrants removal from the ballot.”

The attorney general’s office last month asked the state Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of the legalization initiative. The court accepted the request and set a schedule for state officials and the cannabis campaign to file briefs this month. Proponents of the measure have until January 12 to submit response briefs, then the opposition has until January 20 to reply.

New material in Re: Adult Personal Use of Marijuana (initial briefs). See the docket here: https://t.co/02OMKcLXl3 pic.twitter.com/JxvNNWGyPh

— FloridaSupremeCourt (@flcourts) January 3, 2026

“The ballot summary impermissibly misleads voters about the actual effect of the proposed amendment,” Uthmeier said, arguing that the way the proposal is written suggests public consumption of marijuana would be entirely prohibited, but it would actually only ban public use in certain designated areas.

The brief says that “countless dictionaries, legal authorities, and common sense dictate that ‘in public’ is a far broader term that covers everything from the local grocery store, fitness center, to the shopping mall.”

“That divergence between summary and amendment misleads voters and is fatal under this Court’s established precedent. After all, polling routinely shows that most Americans oppose the smell of marijuana ‘in public.’ The ballot summary would lead voters to believe that voting yes would ensure there is no marijuana—or its smell—’in public,’ while the actual amendment delivers no such thing. The ‘in public’ summary language would likewise deceive Florida parents into thinking this initiative will prohibit marijuana smoking near their children in hotels, restaurants, sports venues, and other areas open to the general public. The initiative provides no such protection.”

Further, the attorney general’s brief argues that the initiative “fails” because it’s “facially invalid under the United States Constitution.”

Given that marijuana remains federally prohibited drug under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), “the initiative runs head long into the Supremacy Clause, which ensures that federal law ‘shall be the supreme Law of the Land…any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding,'” it says.

“The initiative seeks to ensure access to a robust recreational marijuana market, including by requiring state regulators to assist in guaranteeing the ‘availability’ of marijuana,” the brief continues. “But state law cannot ’empower[]’ people ‘to do precisely what the federal Act forbids them to do,’ and the initiative stands directly athwart Congress’s objectives in enacting the CSA.”

Of course, Florida already allows patients with qualifying conditions to access medical cannabis in contravention of federal law—albeit with unique protections under a congressional rider that must be annually renewed through the appropriations process.

In any case, the attorney general said the federal-state policy disconnect “warrants removal from the ballot.”

“The Legislature added this statutory requirement to its law regulating the initiative process, which the Florida Constitution authorized it to do,” the brief said. “And the Supremacy Clause is as much a part of the ‘United States Constitution’ as any other provision, so faithfully ensuring that the proposal is not facially invalid includes preemption analysis stemming from any validly enacted federal law, like the CSA.”

The office’s final argument is that the initiative “violates the single-subject requirement” for Florida ballot measures, referring to the idea that the proposal improperly touches on multiple aspects of the law, including legalizing possession and regulating the cannabis industry.

“The constitutional text imposes a rigid requirement on the specificity of initiatives,” Uthmeier said. “This Court has, at times, applied a more relaxed view of what constitutes a single subject. But text, context, and precedent confirm that ‘subject’ must be read narrowly. And under this proper view, any matter must be inextricably intertwined to be ‘directly connected’ under a single subject.”

“But the initiative fails either under this proper standard or under the Court’s current oneness-of-purpose test. The proposed amendment spreads far beyond marijuana legalization and extends to childhood advertising bans, business licensing, and permissible marijuana business structures. These disparate facets of the initiative muddle voter choice and propose wide-ranging changes to Florida’s legal landscape. The single-subject requirement—as originally and properly understood—exists to prevent this dynamic.”

The Drug Free America Foundation, meanwhile, said in its brief that “proponents for recreational marijuana use in Florida have attempted to dodge the legislative process by way of constitutional amendment,” and this “latest iteration of the marijuana ballot initiative is fatally flawed and must be stricken from the ballot.”

It echoes the attorney general’s position that the measure is “facially invalid” because it conflicts with federal law that “unequivocally prohibits anyone from possessing or using marijuana for nearly every purpose.”

“Therefore, if Florida were to pass the Proposed Amendment, it would create a positive conflict because the use and possession of marijuana remains federally illegal,” it said. “And under the well-established hierarchy of law, no state constitutional amendment can surpass the dictates of federal law and cure federally illegal activity within the state.”

The Florida Chamber of Commerce, Florida Legal Foundation and Judge Frank Shepherd filed a separate joint brief stating that the parties remain “especially vigilant about the abuse of the citizen initiative process by out-of-state interests that think of Florida as just another market and the citizen initiative process as just another means of exploiting that market.”

“The initiative, titled ‘Adult Personal Use of Marijuana,’ poses several problems,” it says. “Any one of these problems is enough to keep the initiative off the ballot. Together they highlight its fundamental flaws.”

The Florida Chamber of Commerce has consistently opposed attempts to move forward with adult-use legalization, even as its own polling has shown majority support for the reform.

“First, state law can’t make legal what federal law makes illegal,” it said. “Federal law makes illegal the acquisition, cultivation, processing, transportation, and sale of marijuana. The proposed constitutional amendment tries to make all this legal.”

“What’s more, the State of Florida would become complicit in the federal crime. That’s because the state would license businesses engaged in acquisition, cultivation, processing, transportation, and sale of the drug. The state’s legalization and commercialization of recreational marijuana would create a positive conflict with federal law, making compliance with both impossible. Even if a person or business could comply with both, the proposed amendment would frustrate federal objectives, meaning there would be obstacle preemption.”

The brief also asserts that the scope of the proposal is too broad for a constitutional amendment that advocates hope to be decided by voters because it “permits higher-level changes to how laws are made, not the enactment of specific statutory text. The latter is the legislature’s job.”

The parties repeated claims about violating the single-subject requirement for ballot measures and the idea that the ballot summary is “misleading” because of the public smoking provisions.

“While the initiative contains a prohibition on this conduct, it includes no enforcement mechanisms or penalties. There isn’t even a requirement for the legislature to create the relevant enforcement mechanisms or penalties,” it says. “Without more, voters are left with the impression that they don’t have to worry about marijuana smoke in public parks or colorful gummies attractive to children. But a toothless prohibition like this is no prohibition at all. It seems intended only to hoodwink voters.”

Associated Industries of Florida also claimed in its own brief that the initiative is invalid because “the state-facilitated recreational marijuana industry envisioned by the proposed amendment conflicts on its face with the federal Controlled Substances Act,” while similarly arguing that it violates the single-subject rule and misleads voters based on the summary language.

The briefs were filed days after Smart and Safe Florida filed a new lawsuit against state officials, alleging that they improperly directed the invalidation of about 71,000 signatures as a turn-in deadline approaches.

The campaign has been fighting several legal battles this cycle to ensure that its initiative is able to qualify for ballot placement.

The latest lawsuit, filed in the Leon County circuit court, claims Secretary of State Cord Byrd (R) directed county election officials to invalidate about 42,000 signatures from so-called “inactive” voters and roughly 29,000 signatures collected by out-of-state petitioners.

This comes after another court upheld a previous decision to strike about 200,000 signatures that the state said were invalid because the petitions didn’t include the full text of the proposed initiative. The campaign contested the legal interpretation, but it declined to appeal the decision based on their confidence they’d collected enough signatures to make up the difference.

Now, with a February 1 deadline to submit 880,062 valid signatures just about a month away, Smart & Safe Florida is signaling that the additional invalidations could jeopardize their chances of making the ballot. Currently, the state has validated 675,307 signatures.

Activists said in November that they’d collected more than one million signatures to put the cannabis measure on the ballot, but it’s also challenged officials at the state Supreme Court level over delays the certification process, arguing that the review of the ballot content and summary should have moving forward months ago when it reached an initial signature threshold. The state then agreed to move forward with the processing.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) campaigned heavily against an earlier version of the legalization proposal, which received a majority of voters last year but not enough to meet the 60 percent threshold required to pass a constitutional amendment. Former Attorney General Ashley Moody (R) unsuccessfully contested the prior initiative in the courts.

In March, meanwhile, two Democratic members of Congress representing Florida asked the federal government to investigate what they described as “potentially unlawful diversion” of millions in state Medicaid funds via a group with ties to DeSantis. The money was used to fight against a citizen ballot initiative, vehemently opposed by the governor, that would have legalized marijuana for adults.

The lawmakers’ letter followed allegations that a $10 million donation from a state legal settlement was improperly made to the Hope Florida Foundation, which later sent the money to two political nonprofits, which in turn sent $8.5 million to a campaign opposing Amendment 3.

The governor said last February that the newest marijuana legalization measure is in “big time trouble” with the state Supreme Court, predicting it would be blocked from going before voters this year.

“There’s a lot of different perspectives on on marijuana,” DeSantis said. “It should not be in our Constitution. If you feel strongly about it, you have elections for the legislature. Go back candidates that you believe will be able to deliver what your vision is on that.”

“But when you put these things in the Constitution—and I think, I mean, the way they wrote, there’s all kinds of things going on in here. I think it’s going to have big time trouble getting through the Florida Supreme Court,” he said.

The latest initiative was filed with the secretary of state’s office just months after the initial version failed during the November 2024 election—despite an endorsement from President Donald Trump.

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.”

In 2023, the governor accurately predicted that the 2024 cannabis measure from the campaign would survive a legal challenge from the state attorney general. It’s not entirely clear why he feels this version would face a different outcome.

While there’s uncertainty around how the state’s highest court will navigate the measure, a poll released last February showed overwhelming bipartisan voter support for the reform—with 67 percent of Florida voters backing legalization, including 82 percent of Democrats, 66 percent of independents and 55 percent of Republicans.

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In the background, a recent poll from a Trump-affiliated research firm found that nearly 9 in 10 Florida voters say they should have the right to decide to legalize marijuana in the state.

Meanwhile, a pro-legalization GOP state lawmaker recently filed a bill to amend state law to codify that the public use of marijuana is prohibited.

Rep. Alex Andrade (R), the sponsor, said last year that embracing cannabis reform is a way for the Republican party to secure more votes from young people.

Separately, Florida medical marijuana officials are actively revoking the registrations of patients and caregivers with drug-related criminal records. The policy is part of broad budget legislation signed into law last year by DeSantis. The provisions in question direct the state Department of Health (DOH) to cancel registrations of medical marijuana patients and caregivers if they’re convicted of—or plead guilty or no contest to—criminal drug charges.

Meanwhile, last month, a Florida Republican senator filed a bill to expand the state’s medical marijuana program, in part by increasing supply limits for patients and waiving registration fees for honorably discharged military veterans.

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