Doug Ducey’s Fuzzy Math on Marijuana is an Ongoing Job Killer in Arizona
During his time in office, Governor Doug Ducey has stopped a variety of bipartisan efforts to support a new industry and create jobs for Arizonans. In 2017, Ducey’s veto of SB1337, which would have opened Arizona up to industrial hemp cultivation, is just one example of his flawed mathematics regarding safe and economically viable marijuana policy. In his veto letter, Governor Ducey cited a lack of funding to implement the policy as his rationale, despite the fact that no evidence supports that statement and the new industry would have been an economic boon for Arizona.
Doug Ducey’s Fuzzy Math on Marijuana is an Ongoing Job Killer in Arizona
In 2017, Ducey's opposition to the Hemp industry once again showed that the opponents of safe uses for anything that’s marijuana related are driven by political ideologies that aren’t based in scientific or economic facts.” When he was rejecting the hemp industry, there was absolutely no evidence which supported Governor Ducey’s reasoning for this veto and his position clearly contradicted his own words about Arizona being ‘Open for Business’. It was just more of the same fear-mongering aimed at undermining safe and legal uses for marijuana and hemp related products.
In response to this 2017 veto, multiple statewide advocacy groups popped up to advocate for an education agenda which was more proactive than the one the government had already implemented during the first five months of 2017.
During that same time, an Arizona Republic article outed the fact that the Governor falsely claimed that the 2016 ballot measure to legalize marijuana, Proposition 205, would have been a “net financial loser for our state” during a speech at the Marijuana Education Summit on April 20, 2017 in Atlanta, GA. As The Arizona Republic’s fact checking team pointed out in an article posted on May 24th (click here to read the article), the Governor’s claimes simply can’t be supported by the facts.
Since that time, Arizona's Legislature was finally able to pass a program to start a statewide hemp industry, and at that time, Governor Ducey finally began to understand the math of how this industry could both help his reelection possibilities and help the state economically at the same time. The issue is that it took far too long for him to come to that understanding and while he played political games, Arizona suffered. It seemed that in 2018, Ducey was last in line to finally cave to understanding that the two decade long fight to have a hemp industry in Arizona was right for industry and the citizens alike.