Business View Magazine | September 2019

23 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2019 including the only two that passed through state legislatures — Illinois and Vermont. In the coming years, we expect to chip away at more and more states and bring legalization of medical marijuana to them.” BVM: How do you decide which issues to focus on? O’Keefe: “There are a few factors we use to choose a state campaign. Roughly half of the states have a ballot initiative process and about half don’t. In the states without ballot measures, you can’t just collect signatures and let the voters decide. You have to convince the legislature to enact the law. Of course, in order to run any campaign, we need money. And we need to have reasons to think it’s actually viable. “My department leads our state legislative work. When we decide which states to target, we look at who the leaders are in the legislative chambers, we look at the party composition (if it’s Democrats or Republicans in control), and what leaders have said about marijuana policy. We’ve been around so long now, in many cases, first we did medical in a state, then decriminalization, and then we work on adult-use. We often have lobbyists we’ve worked with for years and we have a good feel for when states are ripe for reform. “Once we have the funding to work in a state, and we think it’s viable to pass with a funded campaign, in an ideal world we’d have one or two firms that would do the lobbying. We’d also have a least one staffer working on legislative drafting, and creating materials that would respond to concerns and make the case for marijuana legalization. We’d have organizers that help find and prep witnesses to speak at hearings and press conferences. Sometimes, we do paid advertising that draws attention to the issue. This past year, in South Carolina we ran a medical marijuana billboard featuring a veteran. We also use a variety of other media tactics to get grassroots pressure — such as Facebook ads to get emails to lawmakers, and phone banks (either paid or volunteer). To sum it up, our legislative campaigns have three main parts: professional lobbyists, organizers for the grassroots, and organizers for the grass tops, when the media come in.” BVM: How do the ballot initiatives work? Schweich: “With ballot initiatives, we partner with groups and individuals to form state campaigns. We’ll raise money into that campaign committee and it will spend money on two primary things: First, collecting signatures to qualify for the ballot initiative, sometimes hundreds of thousands of signatures in larger population states. That’s very difficult to do with just volunteers, so that’s a major expense. The other one is advertising. Once you qualify for the ballot, making the case to voters that this is a good policy decision and that they should vote “yes.” “At MPP, we partner with other national groups and in-state groups to form ballot initiative campaigns. We help provide strategy and other resources to make sure these campaigns succeed. The ballot initiatives we’ve played a large role in recently include: Colorado legalization in 2012; Alaska legalization in 2014; legalization in Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada in 2016; legalization in Michigan in 2018; and also the Utah medical cannabis campaign in 2018. MPP has a really strong track record and real expertise on how to run these campaigns, how to handle communications in the media, how to create the