If the opponents of 2018′s Proposition 2 had continued their campaign — rather than agree to an informal ceasefire a month before the election — Gayle Ruzicka is confident they would have defeated the medical marijuana initiative.
“We had a big ad campaign ready to go,” Ruzicka, president of the Utah Eagle Forum, said Monday. “I know we would have won.”
Ruzicka and other members of the Drug Safe Utah coalition were asked by state leaders to abandon their efforts in service of a legislative compromise that ultimately replaced Proposition 2 in statute.
But next week, lawmakers will vote on amendments to Utah’s medical marijuana law that dismantle the compromise’s signature component: a centralized, state-run distribution system that would have turned county health departments into cannabis pharmacies and minimized the role of private dispensaries in providing drugs to patients.