Marijuana Moment: Florida Lawmakers Vote To Slash Medical Marijuana Fees For Military Veterans

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A Florida bill to significantly reduce the fee for military veterans to obtain medical marijuana registry identification cards has cleared another legislative committee.

The House Health & Human Services Committee approved the measure from Reps. Susan Valdés (R) and Michelle Salzman (R) in a 22-0 vote on Tuesday. This comes after the legislation cleared two other House panels and as separate Senate legislation to reduce medical cannabis costs for veterans is also advancing.

If HB 887 is enacted into law, veterans who have been honorably discharged would need to pay a $15 fee to obtain a medical cannabis card—down from the current $75 fee for most qualifying patients.

The $15 charge would also apply to any replacement cards, as well as annual renewals.

In order to qualify for the reduced fee, veterans would need to supply the state Department of Health (DOH) with a copy of their discharge release form, a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) identification card or a Florida driver license “bearing the veteran designation.”

The law would take effect beginning on July 1 of this year.

“Medical cannabis has shown a promise in alleviating symptoms commonly experienced by our military veterans, like managing chronic pain, alleviating the effects of PTSD, improving sleep and the most important part of this is reducing the dependency on opioids,” Valdés said before the latest committee vote. “This bill will largely reduce the financial barriers that veterans face when accessing the card.”

According to a bill analysis, the reform would have an “indeterminate, negative fiscal impact on DOH.” While there are currently more than 931,000 registered medical marijuana patients in Florida, the “number of veterans who hold active medical marijuana use registry identification cards is unknown,” and so “the amount of revenue reduction is unknown.”

That said, the analysis states that the policy change would “have a positive fiscal impact on veterans who will experience a $60 reduction in the cost of the identification card under the bill.”

Earlier this month, the Senate Health Policy Committee advanced a bill from Sen. Alexis Calatayud (R) that would also reduce the medical cannabis registration fees for veterans to $15 and enact other reforms to expand medical marijuana access.

Under that proposal as amended, a doctor would be able to recommend up to five 70-day supply limits of cannabis or up to 10 35-day supply limits of smokable marijuana products. Under current law, they can only provide recommendations for a maximum of three 70-day supply limits for non-smokable cannabis and six 35-day supply limits for smokable marijuana.

The bill, SB 1032, would further make it so doctors would need to evaluate patients for medical marijuana qualification every 52 weeks, rather than the current statutory requirement of evaluations every 30 weeks.

Here’s an overview of other pending Florida marijuana bills:

• A House lawmaker is sponsoring a bill to legalize recreational marijuana that also aims to break up what he calls “monopolies” in the state’s current medical cannabis program by revising the business licensing structure.
• Another representative’s bill would protect the parental rights of medical cannabis patients, preventing them from losing custody of their children for using their medicine in accordance with state law.
• Other legislation would also allow doctors to recommend cannabis to any patient who has a condition for which they have been prescribed opioids.
• A senator is sponsoring a bill to legalize home cultivation of marijuana for registered medical cannabis patients in the state.

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Meanwhile, a Florida campaign seeking to put marijuana legalization on the ballot is facing another complication as it continues to litigate the status of its 2026 signature drive. Under a new election law, the hundreds of thousands of signatures activists already collected for this year will not be carried over into the 2028 cycle.

Smart & Safe Florida recently submitted an appeal to the state Supreme Court concerning the invalidation of about 71,000 signatures for its 2026 petition, for example.

While the court agreed to close a separate case involving a legal review into the ballot measure from Smart & Safe Florida, it’s now been handed another case challenging the earlier mass signature invalidation.

Back in December, advocates filed a lawsuit in the Leon County circuit court, claiming Secretary of State Cord Byrd (R) unlawfully 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.

That lawsuit came 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.

Smart & Safe Florida has generally disputed the secretary of state’s signature count, asserting the campaign submitted over 1.4 million petitions—hundreds of thousands more than the 880,062 valid signatures required to go before voters.

Ahead of the signature turn-in, Florida’s attorney general and several business and anti-marijuana groups urged the state Supreme Court to block the cannabis initiative, calling it “fatally flawed” and unconstitutional.

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 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.

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

Last month, the state attorney general’s office opened dozens of criminal investigations and submitted subpoenas requesting records from Smart & Safe Florida and its contractors and subcontractors over alleged fraud related to the petitioning effort.

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.

The governor campaigned heavily against an earlier version of the legalization proposal, which received a majority of voters in 2024 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.

Last 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.

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 expressed optimism that the revised version would 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.

Photo courtesy of Max Jackson.

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