Portland, Maine votes next month on a marijuana legalization ballot measure. Mike Riggs posits that “turning cities into building blocks for statewide changes is sometimes the best legalization advocates can hope for”:
Despite its seemingly limited impact, measures like Portland’s can still be vital to changing marijuana laws. For starters, they’re far cheaper to field than statewide ballot initiatives. “We got to 3,000 signatures through volunteers mostly,” Boyer says. To get an initiative on Maine’s state ballot, legalization advocates would need closer to 60,000 signatures, and that would cost money. Fighting for policy changes in just one city also means spending less on ad buys.
Cities are also part of the legalization movement’s long game. Before Colorado voted as a state to legalize pot, Denver, Breckenridge, and Nederland passed legalization initiatives in 2005, 2009, and 2010, respectively, giving the 2012 push that much more momentum. The flip side of such victories is that if you can’t get big, dense, liberal cities to support marijuana legalization, the state’s probably not ready.
The Dish 