Trulieve Business Model ‘Reckless,’ Florida Attorney General Argues in New Ballot Measure Brief

Florida’s chief legal officer is continuing to go at Trulieve’s throat in her quest to keep a constitutional amendment to legalize adult-use cannabis off the state’s 2024 ballot.

Ashley Moody, the Sunshine State’s attorney general, called the Tallahassee-based multistate cannabis operator’s financial backing of the proposal “reckless” in a 26-page reply brief filed Aug. 2 in the Florida Supreme Court.

“In its pursuit of a larger customer base and greater profits, Trulieve has invited millions of Floridians to join it in reckless violation of federal criminal law,” Moody wrote. “In response, the sponsor declares that it ‘strains credulity well past the breaking point to think that the average voter is unaware that marijuana is illegal at the federal level.’”

This is an ongoing effort by Moody, who filed her original brief June 26, urging the court’s justices to rule the legalization proposal unfit for the ballot. As required, Moody submitted Smart & Safe Florida’s citizen-led petition to the state’s Supreme Court on May 15, where, like other ballot initiatives, it must now survive the judicial test of single-subject requirements and whether the ballot language is clear and unambiguous.

RELATED: Florida Attorney General Attacks Trulieve CEO, Lays Out 4-Part Argument Against Cannabis Ballot Measure for Supreme Court

While David Bellamy, of the Bellamy Brothers music duo, chairs the Smart & Safe Florida (SSF) political action committee, which sponsors of the initiative, Trulieve represents the primary financial muscle behind the campaign with more than $39 million in contributions so far, according to the Florida Department of State.

In Moody’s response to SSF’s claim that Florida voters are well aware of the federal illegality of cannabis, the attorney general questioned the intelligence of Florida voters in this week’s reply brief.

“Most Americans cannot name a single Supreme Court justice,” Moody wrote, citing a 2018 Newsweek article. “And the sponsor fails to acknowledge its own, and the press’s, responsibility for sowing public misperception about that very fact. If anything, most reasonable voters would not assume that a national corporation like Trulieve would openly and notoriously violate federal criminal law.”

This claim stems from one of Moody’s original four main arguments: The amendment implies that it would “allow recreational marijuana,” when in fact cannabis would remain a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law, she wrote in her June 26 brief.

But to counter this point, SSF attorneys argued in their 99-page brief filed July 19 that the text of the amendment itself provides that “Nothing in this section changes federal law or requires the violation of federal law or purports to give immunity under federal law.” (The underlined emphasis is in the original text.)

With the back-and-forth emphasis on this point in particular, Florida’s Supreme Court justices will likely weigh the ballot language’s unambiguity standard based on their interpretation of common knowledge among the state’s electorate: Does the average voter know cannabis is prohibited under federal law?

Five of the seven justices were on the bench when the judicial body ruled in 5-2 decisions that a pair of previous attempts to legalize adult-use cannabis were misleading to voters and insufficient to appear on the November 2022 ballot. In addition, five of the current justices were appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a vocal opponent of legalization.

“Trulieve may be reckless enough to stake an entire business model on the whims of federal prosecutors,” Moody wrote Aug. 2. “But it cannot invite Florida voters to permanently amend their governing charter by promising that the amendment will do something (‘allow’ recreational marijuana) that it will not do.”

Listed as a Schedule I drug on the Controlled Substances Act, cannabis still has no currently accepted medical use or benefit in the eyes of federal law. Still, Florida voters legalized the state’s current medical cannabis program in the November 2016 election—a program that is now a benchmark for the nation with more than 835,000 patients and 583 dispensaries.

While Moody’s main points from her original brief were revisited in the most recent Aug. 2 filing, she did suggest the best way to legalized adult-use cannabis in Florida would be to abolish the currently medical program—claiming that existing Medical Marijuana Treatment Centers (MMTCs), like Trulieve, are advocating for the currently proposal for their own benefits.

“In the end, if [SSF] wanted to abolish state-law barriers to recreational marijuana, the straightforward way would have been to erase the old medical regime and replace it with a recreational one,” she wrote. “It instead built recreational marijuana into the old regime. Why? Because the sponsor is backed by an MMTC that already has a license and on day one will be able to sell recreational marijuana with no further steps required.”

Read the entire reply brief here:

FloridaAG Replybrief Aug.2023 by Tony Lange on Scribd