There’s a Funny Reason Ron DeSantis Is Opposed to Legalizing Weed in Florida

Floridians are about to vote on Amendment 3, a ballot measure that would legalize recreational marijuana for all adults. The state is already the country’s largest medical-only market, with 831,000 doctor-approved patients spending more than $2 billion annually. Legalizing it fully would open sales to the Sunshine State’s 140 million annual visitors.

This potential bonanza has the cannabis industry salivating. Tallahassee-based Trulieve, one of the country’s largest pot companies, with almost 160 dispensaries in Florida alone, has put more than $140 million into the effort, more than 90 percent of total contributions. For comparison, the two sides in Florida’s “likely Republican”–rated Senate race have raised a combined $73 million.

Like the state’s upcoming vote on whether to protect the right to abortion until fetal viability, Amendment 3 needs 60 percent support to pass. Legalization has never been more popular: A year ago, Gallup found 70 percent of Americans support it—87 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of Republicans—with support more than doubling since 2001.

It’s among the least-partisan issues in the country, a reflection of the policy’s general popularity and the opposition’s low voltage. Almost no one protests pot shops. But the politics, somewhat removed from our familiar red–blue divides, are anything but docile. And in Florida they’re a proxy fight for how the cannabis industry will take shape nationwide.

The ballot measure, on the eve of the vote, appears closer than legalization’s broad popularity suggests. A new poll from Florida Atlantic University puts support at exactly 60 percent. Reluctance among some voters in the state may owe to controversy over whether the amendment is too friendly to Trulieve and other big companies in how it would shape the state’s market. Leading the opposition to the “big weed cartel” that Amendment 3 would create is Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Despite making his name as one of America’s staunchest conservatives, DeSantis picking this fight is unusual for several reasons. First, politicians don’t normally volunteer to oppose things that are as broadly popular as legal weed, especially when it requires going against a good portion of their voters, allies, and donors.

Now, due largely to DeSantis’ opposition, Amendment 3 has split Florida Republicans. Longtime legalization supporter Rep. Matt Gaetz has sided with DeSantis—he says it shouldn’t be resolved in the state constitution—but Donald Trump endorsed the measure, soon after a reported meeting with Trulieve CEO Kim Rivers.

One can see the logic in DeSantis, who has built his career on anti-wokeness, taking on weed, which still carries a vague whiff of the anti-capitalist left. But in fact, Trulieve—which won Florida’s first medical marijuana license in 2015—had ties to Tallahassee Republicans when DeSantis was a congressional backbencher. The governor’s position while in office, since 2018, has been to project his distaste for the product and its “putrid” smell while quietly working with the industry, which in Florida meant working with Trulieve.

DeSantis’ position was tenable, if not especially principled. Quite a few 420-averse politicians, of both parties, have managed to convey their views without anchoring themselves to an apparent losing position.

But instead of voicing his opposition to Amendment 3 and getting out of the way, DeSantis is holding press conferences and spending taxpayer money on opposition ads. Over the past 10 years, as recreational state markets expanded from one (Colorado) to 24, no elected official has expended as much political capital against the plant’s ineffable progress. Whatever the virtues of the anti–Amendment 3 argument, DeSantis’ political brand and history with the industry makes him a particularly poor messenger.

With legal weed now popular and accessible to most Americans, anti-weed ads have evolved in tone. Several of the “No on 3” ads are more anti-Trulieve than anti-weed. One spot, titled “Them,” intones: “They wrote it. They rigged it. You can’t grow yours. You have to buy theirs.” It then references Lorna McMurrey, a 27-year old who collapsed during her shift at a Trulieve factory in Massachusetts and later died at a hospital.

Before DeSantis took on Trulieve, he was its ally. The first bill he signed as governor, in 2019, allowed sales of smokable medical weed, in addition to vapes. The next year his Department of Health allowed dispensaries to start selling edibles. And while he now rails against Trulieve as a weed cartel, the Florida market he has overseen is arguably the least friendly of all the state pot markets for small businesses. The state mandates vertical integration of legal weed companies, meaning that all licensed companies must own their own farms, factories, and retail stores.

Nikki Fried, chair of the Florida Democratic Party, has endorsed Amendment 3 while calling for a legislative overhaul that would allow more companies into the market. “This is about freedom,” she said. “This is about opportunity to make sure that we go back to the libertarian state that we always have been.”

My read was that DeSantis (like other staunch social conservatives) had correctly assessed weed’s waning value as culture war fodder. Surely he realized that when places like Missouri and Ohio have fully legalized, Florida—home to Florida Man and a great many retired boomers‍—seems like an unlikely place for legal weed to meet its Waterloo. But I may have assigned him better political instincts than he actually has. And now he’s enmeshed in the weed industry’s very messy civil war.

In recent years, pot politics have turned nasty as legal usage soars and the industry continues to struggle under taxes, regulations, and other burdens stemming from its ongoing federal illegality. And an incident generally understood to be an accident of Congress has made the issue far more complex.

Up for reelection in 2018, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tossed a bone to Kentucky farmers by championing the legalization of hemp, which is cannabis containing a very small amount (0.3 percent) of the intoxicant THC, compared to 15 to 25 percent in a store-bought joint. Hemp, advocates say, has the potential to be used in insulation, building materials, and potentially many other industrial uses. With McConnell’s support, legal hemp was added to the massive agriculture law, or “farm bill,” that Congress usually enacts every five years.

Hemp has not yet gained much business traction as an industrial material. However, after the farm bill passed, companies soon started manufacturing intoxicating products from the nonintoxicating compounds found in hemp (such as CBD). Because these products are derived from the federally legal hemp plants (which, to be clear, are the same species of plant—cannabis sativa—as federally illegal marijuana plants), hemp-derived products are not subject to many of the onerous requirements imposed on legal weed. The lower cost and easier production means hemp products now pose a serious threat to licensed weed businesses. (McConnell, who still opposes legalization, has never commented on the chaos he unleashed.)

While state-legal cannabis is generally sold only at licensed dispensaries, hemp-derived gummies, joints, and vapes soon arrived in gas stations and smoke shops nationwide. Websites materialized for buying them across state lines, a no-no for licensed weed. Intoxicating hemp sodas quickly became available in liquor stores, bars, and restaurants in some states, whereas Amsterdam-style cannabis cafés have faced protracted struggles in some of the same states. Florida’s hemp industry quickly grew to several times the size of its marijuana industry.

Legal-cannabis states generally impose limits on potency, ban sales to minors, and ban kid-friendly advertising, like labels with cartoon characters, but these rules didn’t initially apply to intoxicating hemp products, and states had to catch up. Now some hemp companies paint themselves as more responsible operators and call for common-sense regulations, such as no sales to kids.

The marijuana industry meanwhile howls about having to compete with unregulated, lower-taxed hemp products and the dangers they pose to public health. It’s a reasonable point. And in response some states have been striving to rein in the hemp industry. In September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom effectively banned hemp products, calling them a threat to children, even as his administration struggles to regulate hazards in the licensed cannabis industry.

But in June, when DeSantis was presented with a bill that would have imposed a similar hemp ban, he vetoed it. In the following weeks, CBS reported on text messages that showed hemp executives—whose lobbyists also have deep ties to Florida Republicans—rallying around DeSantis and pledging $5 million to the Florida Republican Party. Those messages showed that in turn, the state GOP would use that money to fight Amendment 3. “We know nothing in life is free and neither was this veto,” said an introductory post in a WhatsApp message group called Save Florida Hemp.

In an interview with CBS, an executive with a hemp distributor denied any quid pro quo. “What this is is a governor who fought for small business, who said clearly when he issued the veto that he didn’t like the legislation because it was going to hurt small business. And this is small business stepping up to the plate and supporting that governor against an initiative that not only he feels is wrong, but we as an industry feel is wrong.”

“His office has real-time access to this list … and is seeing these names and every contribution,” one hemp executive posted in the WhatsApp group.

DeSantis’ office has denied there was any deal regarding the veto. It also denied monitoring contributions from the hemp industry. He has said he vetoed the hemp-ban bill because it would “impose debilitating regulatory burdens on small businesses.”

In fairness, DeSantis has tried to address the hemp issue. He signed a bill banning hemp sales to kids and kid-friendly packaging the previous year. Still, with 9,000 Florida stores selling hemp products, cannabis industry representatives say noncompliant products are widespread and that enforcement is lax. (Further confusing matters, many so-called hemp products are actually mislabeled weed illegally exported from other states.)

Many questions about weed legalization remain unanswered, but after a decade, there’s now a basic understanding of how state marijuana markets work and are regulated. However the DeSantis–hemp alliance came about, it now looks like he’s attacking the gray industry of legal weed to benefit the grayer industry of legal hemp.

Brady Cobb, the CEO of Ft. Lauderdale–based Sunburn Cannabis, and a politically plugged-in registered Republican, didn’t expect DeSantis to oppose full legalization. What happened? “I think he got some bad advice.”

When intoxicating hemp products started gaining traction, around 2021, there was especially strong demand in the generally more conservative states which have not (yet) legalized pot. And it gained a reputation as “red-state weed.” Now in a position of greater strength, the industry is in no mood to concede ground. Some hemp partisans have assumed a MAGA sneer. “It’s kind of absurd to characterize the situation as unfair competition,” a hemp industry lobbyist previously told me. “Hemp operators waited until it was legal.”

The new hemp industry won’t go away if Amendment 3 passes. But if Trulieve’s initiative fails, hemp will no doubt be emboldened to press its economic advantage over marijuana more widely. For consumers, the consequences of Big Weed and Big Hemp butting heads are unclear. But there are echoes of DeSantis’ failed primary campaign against Trump, when he tried to be more MAGA than the MAGA king. If that had worked, he’d be at the top of the ticket on Tuesday.