Photogprahy courtesy of Torben Hansen, Wikimedia Commons
Missouri voters could decide in 2016 if they want marijuana legalized statewide. Sgt. Gary Wiegert, a 34-year veteran of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, already has made his decision.
Wiegert is in favor of full legalization of marijuana in Missouri. The city police sergeant is a lobbyist for Show Me Cannabis, the organization that's leading the effort to get marijuana legalization on the ballot next year.
The Missouri Secretary of State’s office announced that the initiative petition submitted by Show Me Cannabis to legalize marijuana had met the standard for circulation to collect signatures. To qualify for the ballot, 157,788 signatures are needed. Marijuana legalization proponents plan to collect about twice that many signatures to ensure that a sufficient number are from registered voters. The signatures need to represent at least 8 percent of votes cast in the last gubernatorial election in six of Missouri's eight congressional districts in order to change the state's constitution.
Wiegert’s support of marijuana legalization and his secondary employment as a lobbyist were initially opposed by the city's police hierarchy. A former head of the police union, Wiegert had lobbied in Jefferson City for the union and for the Tea Party, but when he publicly advocated for legal use of marijuana, his bosses tried to stop him.
“I was a lobbyist for the Tea Party, and no one said anything about it,” Wiegert says. “When they found out I was lobbying for Show Me Cannabis, they were up in arms. I knew there would be push-back; I didn’t realize how much push-back there would be.”
In 2013, he says, his captain told him not to speak to media, and Police Chief Sam Dotson said his lobbying for marijuana legalization was “inappropriate.” Wiegert hired a lawyer, and a few months later a judge ruled that he should be allowed to lobby for anyone, as long as he was off duty.
Once cleared, Wiegert has been public about his secondary work, recording radio commercials that play on KSHE 95 and other stations. Politically, Wiegert approaches the question from the right, as a libertarian issue. He thinks a coalition of libertarians, marijuana users, and those who want to generate money for the state from what they see as a user tax will form a coalition that will pass full legalization.
John Payne, executive director of Show Me Cannabis, says polls show about half of Missouri voters are in favor of full legalization. A large turn-out for the presidential election, along with a growing cohort of younger voters who support legalization, led to the decision to wait until 2016, says Payne.
Wiegert views marijuana legalization as an issue of individual freedom and believes that its prohibition is not “fiscally responsible” to enforce. When he first started working for the city's police department in 1980, police usually preferred not to arrest people for marijuana possession, he says. Instead, they would take the reefer and throw it away, sometimes in a nearby sewer.
“We had that discretion,” Wiegert says. “In those days, if you’d show up with a marijuana arrest, the other police would laugh at you. They really would, because there were so many other, more important things to do in the city than make marijuana arrests. There was a lot of peer pressure not to make marijuana arrests. The other police thought they’d be out doing your police work for you while you were stuck at the station doing the paperwork.”
His opinion on arresting St. Louisans for marijuana hasn’t changed. “I’ve always thought it was a waste of our time," he says. "You have to do the report-writing, the booking. You have to do the conveying to the station, take them to processing, and then let them go, bring evidence to the lab. Then you have to go to the warrant office and apply for a warrant. You have all of these steps, all this time involved for a little bit of marijuana. It’s not cost-effective for a policeman to do this. That’s when my beliefs changed.”
He believes those reasons, coupled with the cost of incarceration, is a waste of money and human potential. “People are doing heroin and cocaine, and committing burglaries because of it,” he says. “I’ve never known anyone who does a burglary because he wants to smoke marijuana.”
“Police talk about this privately,” Wiegert adds. “Once I came out publicly, all the police who called me said they were with me 100 percent.”
Marijuana legalization supporters go far beyond “a bunch of stoners,” says Wiegert. During his work last year with the legislature, one bill got out of committee with Republican support. “A lot of people told me, ‘Those Republicans will be against it.’ They don’t understand. [Former State Senator] Brian Nieves is on the opposite end of the spectrum from most people in the city on most issues, but this is a freedom issue, so it passed out of committee. Nieves was a great help.”
Getting the support of libertarians is crucial to passing the marijuana initiative in November 2016, he says: “Those are the people we need to push the numbers over so that we win.”
In November 2014, Oregon and Alaska voted to legalize marijuana, joining Colorado and Washington. A founder of Show Me Cannabis, Leah Maurer moved to Oregon in 2009 and was instrumental in the passage of Measure 91, which legalized marijuana in Oregon. She remains with Show Me Cannabis and is working on its proposal for Missouri in 2016.
There has been some turbulence regarding marijuana legalization in Missouri, after the Secretary of State’s office this week approved another ballot measure for circulation for signatures. That proposal would not have age restrictions and would prohibit tax revenues from going to anything to do with law enforcement.
The Show-Me Cannabis-backed proposal would limit sales to those older than 21 and allow revenue from taxes to go to public safety pensions, education, drug-abuse counseling, and cities and counties. The other, more lenient proposal was promoted by Nick Raines of the Kansas City chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which was disbanded from the national organization.
Payne remains confident that voters will see Show-Me Cannabis' ballot initiative in November 2016. “I am not overly concerned about [the Kansas City chapter of NORML] efforts becoming a serious competitor to ours,” says Payne. “We face a lot of obstacles, and our success is far from guaranteed. But if we fail, Nick Raines is not going to be the reason.”
Wiegert is optimistic that a loose coalition of libertarians, marijuana users, cancer patients, and their families who know the anti-nausea benefits of marijuana, as well as those who know the state needs money for a variety of needs, will push to make marijuana legal.
“There is a lot of change in society over this," says Wiegert. "Every year, the numbers change drastically. It’s got to do with the younger generation; each year, you get new people who have new beliefs and can vote. As we educate people, people are listening to what we are saying.”
Editor's Note: This article has been updated from an earlier version.
