Marijuana Moment: Hawaii Lawmakers File Bills To Put Marijuana Legalization On The Ballot For Voters To Decide

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Key Hawaii lawmakers have filed legislation that would put the issue of marijuana legalization on the ballot for voters to decide.

The move comes after repeated efforts to legalize cannabis legislatively in recent sessions have demonstrated momentum but failed before reaching the finish line to be enacted into law.

If the legislature agrees to the new plan, voters would see this on their November ballots:

“Shall the Constitution of the State of Hawaii be amended to:

(1) Authorize individuals aged twenty-one and older to use and possess personal-use amounts of cannabis; and

(2) Require the legislature to enact laws governing the use, manufacture, distribution, sale, possession, regulation, and taxation of cannabis within the State?”

If a majority of voters approved the ballot measure, cannabis legalization would take effect on July 1, 2027.

House Judiciary and Hawaiian Affairs Committee Chairman David Tarnas (D) and Senate Health and Human Services Committee Chair Joy San Buenaventura (D) are the lead sponsors of the new measures. Tarnas’s House proposal has 13 additional cosponsors.

“This is kicking this particular policy decision—very selectively—to the public for a decision,” Tarnas, who has previously sponsored legalization and other marijuana reform bills, said in an interview earlier this month.

Karen O’Keefe, state policies director for the Marijuana Policy Project, told Marijuana Moment that “year after year, the Hawai’i Legislature has failed to enact cannabis legalization, despite strong popular support.”

“It’s time for legislators to give voters the power to expand their privacy and liberty directly,” she said,

While Gov. Josh Green (D) supports legalizing cannabis, and polling has indicated that Hawaiians are ready for the policy change, the new measures signal that the sponsors don’t anticipate that fellow lawmakers will be ready to move forward with a legislative reform this year but may instead be inclined to defer to voters.

Putting the measure on the ballot as a constitutional amendment would require a two-thirds vote in each chamber of the legislature.

That said, Tarnas and San Buenaventura have also filed separate, more traditional statutory cannabis legalization measures for the 2026 session.

House Speaker Nadine Nakamura (D) has acknowledged broad public support for marijuana legalization, but said that some of her chamber’s members from the island of Oahu are not on board with the reform.

Hawaii’s Senate last February narrowly defeated a proposal that would have increased fivefold the amount of cannabis that a person could possess without risk of criminal charges.

Had the measure become law, it would have increased the amount of cannabis decriminalized in Hawaii from the current 3 grams up to 15 grams. Possession of any amount of marijuana up to that 15-gram limit would have been classified as a civil violation, punishable by a fine of $130.

A Senate bill that would have legalized marijuana for adults, meanwhile, ultimately stalled for the session. That measure, SB 1613, failed to make it out of committee by a legislative deadline.

While advocates felt there was sufficient support for the legalization proposal in the Senate, it’s widely believed that House lawmakers would have ultimately scuttled the measure, as they did last February with a legalization companion bill, HB 1246.

In 2024, a Senate-passed legalization bill also fizzled out in the House.

Last year’s House vote to stall the bill came just days after approval from a pair of committees at a joint hearing. Ahead of that hearing, the panels received nearly 300 pages of testimony, including from state agencies, advocacy organizations and members of the public.

Green signed separate legislation last year to allow medical marijuana caregivers to grow marijuana on behalf of up to five patients rather than the current one.

And in July, the governor signed another bill that establishes a number of new rules around hemp products in Hawaii, including a requirement that distributors and retailers obtain a registration from the Department of Health.

Lawmakers also sent a bill to the governor that would help speed the expungement process for people hoping to clear their records of past marijuana-related offenses—a proposal Green signed into law in April.

That measure, HB 132, from Tarnas, is intended to expedite expungements happening through a pilot program signed into law in 2024 by Green. Specifically, it will remove a distinction between marijuana and other Schedule V drugs for the purposes of the expungement program.

The bill’s proponents said the current wording of the law forces state officials to comb through thousands of criminal records manually in order to identify which are eligible for expungement under the pilot program.

Meanwhile, in November, Hawaii officials finalized rules that will allow medical marijuana dispensaries to sell an expanded assortment of products for patients—including dry herb vaporizers, rolling papers and grinders—while revising the state code to clarify that cannabis oils and concentrates can be marketed for inhalation.

The department also affirmed its support for federal marijuana rescheduling—a policy change that President Donald Trump ordered to be completed last month but has yet to come to fruition.

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Regulators are also launching a series of courses designed to educate physicians and other healthcare professionals about medical marijuana as the state’s cannabis program expands.

The underlying medical marijuana expansion bill signed by the governor in late June, in addition to allowing more patients to more easily access cannabis, also contains a provision that advocates find problematic.

Before lawmakers sent the legislation to Green, a conference committee revised the plan, inserting a provision to allow DOH to access medical marijuana patient records held by doctors for any reason whatsoever.

This past fall, regulators solicited proposals to assess the state’s current medical marijuana program—and also sought to estimate demand for recreational sales if the state eventually moves forward with adult-use legalization. Some read the move as a sign the regulatory agency saw a need to prepare to the potential reform.

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