New Hampshire GOP Governor Candidate Attacks Opponent For Saying Marijuana Legalization Can Fund Housing And Schools

Little more than a month ahead of the election that will decide New Hampshire’s next governor, the two major party candidates are starkly divided on the issue of marijuana legalization. Democrat Joyce Craig has said she’d support the reform, pointing to potential revenue that could fund housing and schools, while Republican Kelly Ayotte has belittled that plan.

“Joyce Craig can smoke her way to a balanced budget, but I’m going to do it the old-fashioned way,” Ayotte, a former U.S. senator and state attorney general, told WMUR-TV in an interview that aired on Monday. “We’re going to live within our means.”

Craig, the former mayor of Manchester, has been campaigning in part on ending cannabis prohibition.

“I have said that I am supportive of legalization of cannabis,” she said at a recent press conference, according to WMUR’s report. “We’ll work with the legislation to do that. That will be generating revenues that we can be utilizing within the state of New Hampshire to do better when it comes to affordable housing and education.”

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Ahead of the primary last month, Craig told legalization advocates as part of a candidate interview series that she wants to see New Hampshire establish a legal marijuana market that favors small, local businesses and disincentivizes large or multi-state operators from dominating the state’s market.

“It seems like she thought a lot about this,” Daryl Eames, founder of the New Hampshire Cannabis Association (NHCANN), which hosted the interview series, told Marijuana Moment at the time.

While NHCANN reached out to both leading Republican candidates seeking interviews, neither Ayotte nor her primary challenger responded to the invitations, Eames said.

In purple New Hampshire, legalization has been a largely bipartisan affair—aside from the current governor’s race. This past session, for example, saw a legalization bill led by Republicans but supported by many Democrats—legislation that was ultimately tabled in a bipartisan vote championed by select Democrats in the House who argued the negotiated bill was too fundamentally flawed to approve.

Unlike Republicans trying to replace him, outgoing Gov. Chris Sununu (R), who hesitantly endorsed a legalization bill that would have capped the number of adult-use marijuana retailers at 15.

“I don’t love the idea of legalizing cannabis here. I really don’t,” he said in March. “But knowing that it is probably inevitable, there’s a responsibility to getting the system right. Other states around us have got their systems very wrong.”

By contrast, Ayotte has been clear that she would oppose legalization, recently telling a local reporter that “I don’t think it’s the right direction” for New Hampshire.

In a debate among Republican candidates earlier this year, Ayotte was asked why she was “OK with leaving tax revenue on the table by not legalizing cannabis.”

She replied: “The states that have built their budgets on this is really a fallacy. We have to ask ourselves what is best for the quality of life of people of New Hampshire.”

She’s met people in recovery who have told her that legalization isn’t the right path, Ayotte said at the time, adding that she believes that “when you legalize something, you are sending a different message to our young people.”

She also claimed marijuana legalization would worsen the state’s youth mental health crisis and increase traffic deaths due to impaired driving.

“When people make the argument to me that all of our neighbors are doing it, so we should do it, that’s never the argument that I think is the right way for New Hampshire,” she said in a separate interview around the same time. “We’re different.”

Nearly two thirds of Granite Staters appear to support cannabis legalization. A poll released this summer showed 61 percent of residents supported the legalization bill that almost passed this year—just a few percentage points below the 65 percent support that respondents to a separate poll said they had for legalization generally.

That mismatch between what voters want and what Ayotte is proposing—especially in the context of the flippant manner of her recent comments—could ultimately hurt her at the ballot box, some advocates say.

“I don’t think this sort of thing will resonate well with independent voters,” said Matt Simon, director of public and government relations at medical marijuana provider GraniteLeaf Cannabis. “Jokes like this might have been effective for politicians 15 or 20 years ago, but this is 2024 and Granite Staters overwhelmingly support legalization. New Hampshire is losing cannabis jobs and revenue to neighboring states, and for many voters that is no laughing matter.”

(Disclosure: Simon supports Marijuana Moment’s work through a monthly Patreon pledge.)

Karen O’Keefe, director of state policies for Marijuana Policy Project, similarly said Ayotte’s dismissive comments could turn off voters.

“Mocking cannabis legalization is bad policy and bad politics,” she said. “Two-thirds of New Hampshire voters support legalization, as does the standard bearer for Ayotte’s party. In this toss-up race for governor, being on the wrong side of cannabis freedom could cost Ayotte the race.”

As for the possible revenue boost that legalization could bring, O’Keefe added that the state “is leaving tens of millions of dollars on the table each year as Sen. Ayotte works to ensure the ‘Live Free’ state remains stuck in the prohibitionist past.”

“Meanwhile, New Hampshire residents are struggling with sky-high property tax bills that could be reduced if cannabis tax revenues weren’t being sent across New Hampshire’s borders,” she added.

Since the end of this year’s legislative session, Sununu has approved some more minor marijuana reforms passed by lawmakers. Perhaps most notably, he signed into a law a significant medical marijuana expansion bill that will allow doctors to recommend cannabis for any debilitating condition they believe it would improve. Previously, patients needed to be diagnosed with certain specific conditions to qualify for legal marijuana access.

Enactment of that measure followed the governor’s signing of two other medical marijuana expansion bills: one that added generalized anxiety disorder as a qualifying condition and another that allowed more healthcare providers to certify patients for the state’s medical marijuana program.

Sununu separately vetoed a bill passed by lawmakers that would have allowed medical marijuana businesses to open second cultivation locations, including in greenhouses. Under current law, ATCs in New Hampshire are required to grow marijuana in secure, indoor locations. The use of semi-outdoor structures, including greenhouses, is prohibited.

State lawmakers are scheduled to briefly reconvene later this month to reconsider vetoed bills. It’s uncertain but possible they could return to the cultivation measure or even vote to revive the tabled legalization bill, HB 1633.

The Democrat-led move to table HB 1633 at the tail end of the legislative session sparked accusations by some that the politicians were using the issue to earn the party votes at the ballot box in November. But most who voted against the bill said they were opposed to the plan on its merits, with many pointing to the state-run system, limit on the number of retailers and other restrictions they said were unacceptable.

New Hampshire lawmakers worked extensively on marijuana reform issues a year earlier and attempted to reach a compromise to enact legalization through a multi-tiered system that would include state-controlled shops, dual licensing for existing medical cannabis dispensaries and businesses privately licensed to individuals by state agencies. But the legislature ultimately hit an impasse on that complex legislation.

Bicameral lawmakers then convened a state commission tasked with studying legalization and proposing a path forward last year, though the group ultimately failed to arrive at a consensus or propose final legislation.

The Senate also defeated a more conventional House-passed legalization bill last year, HB 639, despite its bipartisan support.

In May of last year, the House also defeated marijuana legalization language that was included in a Medicaid expansion bill. And the Senate moved to table another piece of legislation that month that would have allowed patients and designated caregivers to cultivate up to three mature plants, three immature plants and 12 seedlings for personal therapeutic use.

After the Senate rejected the reform bills in 2022, the House included legalization language as an amendment to separate criminal justice-related legislation—but that was also struck down in the opposite chamber.

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Photo courtesy of Chris Wallis // Side Pocket Images.