COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio voters will decide in November if marijuana should be legal for recreational use.
Sec. of State Frank LaRose announced Wednesday evening that the proposal to legalize weed gained enough valid signatures in their second go to make the ballot.
The statute didn't have enough valid signatures to make the ballot in July. The group, Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol, only needed 679 valid signatures but ended up submitting nearly ten times the number of signatures needed during their cure period. The period is a 10-day second chance to make up for invalid signatures.
“We are grateful to the thousands of Ohioans who helped us get to this point and are excited to bring our proposal to regulate marijuana like alcohol before Ohio voters this coming Election Day,” spokesperson Tom Haren said.
In early July, the group submitted more than 222,000 petition signatures supporting recreational marijuana in the state, which it gathered in all 88 Ohio counties over the course of eight weeks. This was about 100,000 more than was necessary to be on the ballot. Of the signatures they collected, 123,367 were valid, just short of the required number.
RELATED: Recreational marijuana advocates gather 10 times more signatures than needed
If passed, the law would legalize and regulate recreational cannabis for adults 21 years of age and older. Individual Ohioans would also be able to grow up to six plants but up to 12 per household.
This is one difference from the 2015 proposal, which would have only allowed 10 growing locations.
This proposal would also impose a 10% tax at the point of sale for each transaction, which activists say would raise $350 to $400 million in new tax revenue annually.
This means that Ohioans will be voting on both abortion rights and marijuana this November.
Both are issues people have been debating for decades and the arguments for and against recreational marijuana legalization haven't changed much.
"People are going to prison for this and that just doesn't seem right," said criminal defense attorney, Brian Joslyn.
He represents a lot of clients facing charges related to marijuana.
"I have one nightmare client," Joslyn said. "He got seven years. His wife was in the military, he'd never been in trouble before, he had some pot plants in his basement."
Aubree Adams, who's working with the group Protect Ohio Workers and Families, has a different opinion. She's from Colorado and said when marijuana was legalized there, her husband became addicted.
"We owned two homes in Colorado that we lost, we were middle class and it broke me financially," she said.
This is why she said she's advocating for Ohioans to do more research on the issue.
"We really only need to focus on drug prevention and drug recovery policies not drug promotional policies like legalizing Marijuana," Adams said.
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