Shelton Hull
Words by Shelton Hull
This column is being written two days after an election day that, by my own personal standards, was a total disaster in every conceivable way. Let’s quickly address the elephant in the room, so to speak: I despise Trump and his supporters, and I have no respect for them or their poisonous worldview. But it’s a free country, so to each their own. This is a weed column, and we’ll pivot to that shortly, after we talk about the broader context of Amendment 3, and how what looked to be a virtual lock all year became a casualty of our state’s dysfunctional political dynamic.
You can get your political analysis from the same alt-right flunkies that gaslit liberals into making zero effort in Florida or the states adjoining it. Y’all gave them all the money and the clout, and they led us straight off a cliff, and now they’re gonna spend the next four years flexing on us while we bury our friends. Great job, rubes! Florida was very much in play until they decided they didn’t want to play. The Harris-Walz ticket made zero appearances in Florida. It’s unclear if that would have helped them in Florida, but it would’ve definitely helped the dozens of other Democratic candidates in our 67 counties, most of whom lost because their own leaders didn’t believe in them, so why should voters?
Only six of Florida’s 67 counties voted “yes” on Amendment 3, including Duval County, which passed it by less than a single percentage point. Credit to Mayor Donna Deegan for endorsing it. Even though she gave the scoop to the wrong media outlet, and they buried it, so it never got any actual traction, at least she had the courage to speak up for it, whereas most of her peers ran from it, the same way Democrats have run from weed for the past 30 years straight.
It’s almost ironic that the only real loss for Trump in Florida was on Amendment 3, but it’s not like that was ever a priority. In retrospect, Trump’s endorsement kinda killed its chances because there was no possibility of Democrats giving it any real hype, especially after he began meeting with Brady Cobb of Sunburn Cannabis and Kim Rivers of Trulieve, who basically took the whole thing from start to finish, single-handedly. They spent something like $100 million to get this done, and with billions on the line, the voters simply failed to do their part.
Pro-3 forces overestimated the sensibility of the proposal, and anti-3 forces controlled the debate from day one—specifically Gov. Ron DeSantis, who used taxpayer money to successfully defeat both amendments 3 and 4, plowing millions into a disinformation campaign that went months with minimal pushback from the media because TV stations need that ad revenue. (All the top names are either gone, or on their way out, so they can’t cut those budgets any more, in theory.) Props to Tiffany Salameh at WJXT, who did a yeoman’s work trying to hold him to account in a media vacuum but basically DeSantis won. He may not be a lame duck after all. Given the national results, I’d expect next year’s legislative session to be the most brutal in Florida’s history, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop him now.
Granted, having a woman as the face of this effort was probably a bad idea, especially in a year where violent misogyny was the milkshake that brought all those (f*ck)bois to the yard. Think of all those folks who can normally be barely bothered to vote, but they’re suddenly worried about home grow. It’s the same nonsense that killed the petition drive in 2022, and it’s now been used to kill the best chance at legalization that Florida may ever have. Only a woman could get John Morgan and Donald Trump on the same page about anything.
To be fair, the cannabis market has grown by leaps and bounds over the past decade, and there seemed to be no limit to its potential. But with three out of four states rejecting similar things. We may have finally seen the limits of the plant’s appeal. Basically, every cannabis firm in the state, if not the country, had been operating for most of the year on the assumption that we’d vote “yes” on 3 and push that market into the mid-nine figures into low-10 territory, and every single one of them is now kinda screwed because there will be no growth next year, and depending on what DeSantis wants to do, we may even see a contraction of that market.
With all apologies to Guy Fawkes, we will always remember the Fifth of November, but not for any good reason. The election was fitting conclusion to a brutal year.
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