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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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US: Petition approved in effort to repeal Ohio's cannabis laws Jesse Bethea NBC Friday 13 Feb 2026 “He’s known to nit-pick, so he picked a few nits,” Dennis Willard, spokesperson for the repeal campaign, said this week. “Our attorneys, they looked at what he had picked at and overnight they resolved that issue.” Yost made sure to distance himself from the content of the petition, saying his certification, “should not be construed as an affirmation of the enforceability and constitutionality of the referendum petition.” Ohioans For Cannabis Choice argues S.B. 56 defies the will of the voters who legalized cannabis in 2023 with the Issue 2 ballot initiative. If they can collect the nearly 250,000 valid signatures needed by March 19, enactment of S.B. 56 will be put on hold until the November election. Willard is confident the group will be able to delay the law for at least that long, saying they now have a paid circulation team, as well as volunteers, already out gathering signatures. Some marijuana advocates are not on board with the repeal campaign. Ohio Cannabis Coalition (OHCANN) executive director David Bowling said in a statement, “S.B. 56 upholds the will of Ohio voters by preserving a safe, regulated, adult-use cannabis market while closing dangerous loopholes that allowed untested, intoxicating hemp products and out-of-state marijuana to flood Ohio shelves.” Senate President Rob McColley (R-Napoleon) noted OHCANN’s opposition in comments this week regarding the S.B. 56 repeal effort. “The people who are driving this repeal effort are not the marijuana folks,” McColley said. “The marijuana folks and the backers of Issue 2 actually are against the repeal effort. You can draw your own conclusions as to why.” McColley also said the repeal effort is largely backed by the intoxicating hemp industry, something OHCANN has asserted as well. “They’re absolutely, one hundred percent wrong, wrong, and the people of Ohio know that,” Willard said. “The people of Ohio in 2023 went to the ballot and voted to make cannabis legal. Not to give monopoly rights to a few dispensaries.” Intoxicating hemp became a sticking point for the effort to pass S.B. 56 late last year, when Congress included a federal ban on intoxicating hemp in legislation to end the government shutdown. After that law passed, hemp opponents in the Statehouse included a state ban on intoxicating hemp in S.B 56. The federal ban will not go into effect for another nine months, however, and recently the Trump Administration has suggested interest in keeping some intoxicating hemp products legally available. If the referendum campaign successfully repeals S.B. 56, McColley said, “Really it just reverts to current law, and current law was largely silent as to those things.” According to Willard, Ohioans For Cannabis Choice would welcome the opportunity to help craft Ohio’s regulatory framework for hemp and marijuana if the law is repealed. “Our industry is one hundred percent about regulating,” Willard said. “All they have to do is call us back to Columbus, we’ll sit down with them and regulate this.” https://www.nbc4i.com/news/politics/petition-approved-in-effort-to-repeal-ohios-cannibis-laws/
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