Efforts to ease or remove pot laws expanding to more states

Marijuana Business Daily is reporting efforts are now under way in five new states to legalize either recreational or medical marijuana.

There are signature drives in Missouri, Oklahoma, Utah and South Dakota to legalize medical marijuana. South Dakota also has a proposed ballot measure that would legalize recreational pot use as does Michigan.

The efforts are given a good chance for passage in all of those states. Oklahomans for Health has already raised the signatures needed to put that question on the 2018 ballot while backers in Michigan, the magazine reports, already has 100,000 plus of the 252,523 signatures needed.

Organizers in South Dakota say they have three quarters of the signers needed for both initiatives but the number of signers needed by November is just 13,871.

New Approach Missouri has collected about a third of the 160,000 signatures needed there but, in Utah, it’s too soon to tell since that legalization movement just started this month.

According to Governing Magazine, 26 states have now legalized marijuana in some form.

In eight of those states, both medical and recreational marijuana use is now legal: Alaska, California, Colorado, Oregon, Massachusetts, Maine, Nevada and Washington. Nevada voters did so last November.

In addition, Washington D.C. has legalized personal use but not commercial sale of pot.

Another 23 states have passed laws allowing some medical use of marijuana and 14 states have joined D.C. in decriminalizing pot to some degree.