The supporter of a proposed measure to take away Montana’s legal medical marijuana system stated on Wednesday that he is not going to appeal a judge’s refusal to place the bill on November’s ballot, however, will rather focus on getting rid of another measure that would expand the outreach of medical marijuana. Billings car dealer Steve Zabawa stated in an interview that it is not within his current capabilities to appeal the Montana Supreme Court prior to Secretary of State Linda McCulloch’s office validating the ballots and sending them off to be printed.
Rather, he stated that his Safe Montana group is going to rather try to get rid of I-182. I-182 is a ballot measure that would rid some of the restrictions on medical cannabis. Zabawa made the comments a day after District Judge Heidi Ulbricht countered his plea to get in the way and force McCulloch to place his initiative on the ballot after it ended up falling short of 4,100 signatures to qualify for the ballot. Zabawa stated that thousands of signatures gathered for the initiative were either lost or were wrongly invalidated.
“We’ll spend all our efforts now making sure people know what I-182 is all about,” he stated.
Zabawa also would like to lobby the state Legislature in 2017 to pass a bill that gets rid of cannabis as well as all Schedule 1 drugs in Montana. In addition to this, he is going to think of another measure that he hopes will pass in 2018. Zabawa’s current measure, I-176, looked to repeal Montana’s medical cannabis law and would like to clarify that if a drug is federally illegal, it should be illegal under state law. The result would have been a ban on cannabis use as well as possession in the state, including the 13,170 medical cannabis patients on Montana’s registry.
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