Court date set for medical marijuana initiative dispute sfgate.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sfgate.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUSJanuary 8, 2021 GMT
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) Attorneys trying to block a Mississippi medical marijuana program say the state is using a “zombie law” about old congressional districts to defend how an initiative landed on the ballot.
Voters in November approved Initiative 65, which requires the state Health Department to establish a medical marijuana program by the middle of this year.
A lawsuit by Madison Mayor Mary Hawkins Butler seeks to block the program, arguing that Mississippi’s initiative process is outdated because the state constitution says petitioners must gather an equal number of signatures from five congressional districts.
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Medical marijuana initiative continues to be challenged in state supreme court (Source: AP Photo/Matthew Brown) By Anthony Warren | January 8, 2021 at 1:59 PM CST - Updated January 8 at 9:14 PM
JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) - Another volley has been fired in Madison Mayor Mary Hawkins Butler’s bid to have the state’s medical marijuana initiative tossed.
Butler is asking the Mississippi Supreme Court to throw out the vote, saying the law allowing the measure was unconstitutional.
The mayor filed suit because she is worried about the impact the legalization of medical marijuana would have on her city. She is particularly concerned that city zoning would not be able to prohibit dispensaries from popping up in residential areas.
Welcome to the second edition of The Bluntness Weekly Cannabis Roundup!
If you didn’t catch last week’s roundup, you can find it right here to see what important cannabis headlines you might have missed.
This week – in addition to The Bluntness publishing the 2020-2021 Cannabis Gift Guide – cannabis news was so abundant it was hard to narrow the stories down to our usual five, so we settled on six (and even that was painful).
Let’s jump right into the week’s headlines:
#1) New Study Reveals Cannabis Could Save Dying Bee Populations
What Happened: Researchers from Cornell University found that bees are attracted to large hemp plants. The researchers noted, “Plant height was strongly correlated with bee species richness and abundance for hemp plots with taller varieties attracting a broader diversity of bee species.”