Marijuana Amendment Fails to Qualify for November Ballot for Now
The following is a press release from Family Council Action Committee.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, September 30, 2024
On Monday Secretary of State John Thurston’s office announced that the Arkansas Medical Marijuana Amendment of 2024 failed to qualify for the November ballot.
Family Council Action Committee Executive Director Jerry Cox issued a statement, saying, “This is a good decision, but it’s not the final decision. Every effort to amend the state’s most important governing document, our constitution, must go through a rigorous and thorough process. The bar should be high, and any effort that doesn’t meet it shouldn’t make the ballot. Secretary of State Thurston made the right call.”
Cox went on to say, “This marijuana amendment is a fatally flawed effort to bring recreational marijuana to Arkansas. It would make more than 30 changes to Arkansas’ constitution. This amendment would give a handful of businesses a monopoly over an unregulated marijuana industry, and it would remove important restrictions that protect children from marijuana marketing. A measure this bad simply has no business being on the ballot.”
Cox said Family Council Action Committee will continue opposing the amendment in case the Arkansas Supreme Court decides to put the measure back on the ballot. “The final decision over this measure will rest with the state supreme court. Big businesses have spent nearly two million dollars working to place this marijuana amendment on the ballot. We expect them to ask the Arkansas Supreme Court to overrule the Secretary of State’s decision. We plan to continue fighting Issue 3 in case the court decides to place it back on the ballot.”
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Sports Betting is “Ruining Lives”
A growing body of evidence shows sports gambling is hurting Americans.
Writing in The Atlantic last week, Charles Fain Lehman said,
The evidence is convincing: The betting industry is ruining lives.
Over the weekend, millions of Americans watched football. They cheered, they ate, and—more than ever—they gambled. The American Gaming Association expects $35 billion in bets to be placed on NFL games in 2024, about one-third more than last year’s total.
If you follow sports, gambling is everywhere. Ads for it are all over broadcasts; more than one in three Americans now bets on sports, according to a Seton Hall poll. Before 2018, sports gambling was prohibited almost everywhere. Now it’s legal in 38 states and the District of Columbia, yielding $10 billion a year in revenue.
Readers may be quick to dismiss these developments as harmless. Many sports fans enjoy betting on the game, they say. Is it such a big deal if they do it with a company rather than their friends?
A growing body of social-science literature suggests that, yes, this is in fact quite different. The rise of sports gambling has caused a wave of financial and familial misery, one that falls disproportionately on the most economically precarious households. Six years into the experiment, the evidence is convincing: Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake.
Lehman is not alone. Research is making it clear that sports gambling is anything but a good bet.
Studies indicate people who gamble on sports may be twice as likely to suffer from gambling problems.
Young men are particularly hurt by sports gambling. Twenty-year-old males account for approximately 40% of calls to gambling addiction hotlines. Upwards of 20 million men are in debt or have been in debt as a result of sports betting.
And the Arkansas Problem Gambling Council says it has seen a 22% increase in calls for help with problem gambling — a spike largely driven by sports betting.
Sports betting is out of hand, and some gambling companies have actually produced ads that seem to promote problem-gambling behavior — like commercials that show people so fixated on sports betting that they ignore everyone else around them or ads encouraging people to take every opportunity to gamble.
In light of all of this, it seems accurate to say that sports gambling is “ruining lives.”
Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.