NEBRASKA- Not long after the Nebraska Supreme Court barred an initiative legalizing medical marijuana from going before voters last year, backers of the measure had another petition ready to go for the 2022 election cycle.

To avoid a repeat of the court’s 5-2 decision that the initiative violated the state’s single-subject rule, Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana opted to go with a broad, one-sentence addition to the state constitution.

“Persons in the State of Nebraska shall have the right to cannabis in all its forms for medical purposes,” reads the petition on file with Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen.

But in the weeks after the end of the 2021 legislative session, which saw lawmakers also narrowly defeat a measure, Legislative Bill 474, by Sen. Anna Wishart of Lincoln to legalize cannabis for medical use and create a regulatory framework in the state, Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana has reconsidered its strategy.

With help from the Marijuana Policy Project, the ACLU of Nebraska and others, the ballot initiative committee worked to consider “every possible challenge” a petition could face before going to voters, Wishart said, as well as the best way to get language before voters next November.

To do so, Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana will scrap the petition it filed after the court’s decision last year in favor of a pair of initiatives, said Wishart, who led the 2020 petition drive alongside Sen. Adam Morfeld of Lincoln.

“Our main goal is putting in place language that we feel absolutely confident in,” Wishart said, “that we have looked at every type of potential challenge that could come and feel we have addressed it.”

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