Idaho Officials Say Marijuana Activists Can Begin Collecting Signatures To Put Legalization Measure On 2026 Ballot

Officials in Idaho this week issued an official title and summary for a prospective 2026 ballot measure that would legalize personal use and cultivation of marijuana in the state. Idaho’s secretary of state also approved the petition for circulation, meaning signature gathering can start immediately.

Organizers from the group Kind Idaho submitted a final version of the noncommercial legalization proposal earlier this month. If it appears on the ballot and is approved by voters, it would exempt people 21 and older from Idaho laws against the “possession, production, or cultivation of cannabis” provided certain conditions are met. Marijuana would need to be “for personal use and not for sale or resale” and could not be consumed in a “public or open setting.”

The reform would apply not just to cannabis flower but also products such as “oils, tinctures, gummies and other edibles,” among other form factors. Possession would be limited to ounce of cannabis flower or up to 1,000 milligrams of THC in other marijuana products.

A campaign email to supporters said the possession limit is designed “to allow 90% of Idahoans who live within 60 miles of a border town dispensary to purchase out of state and travel home, with a quantity they are authorized to have in their possession. This gives them peace of mind and does not incentivize their use before driving home.”

Some estimates suggest Idaho residents spend as much as $4.5 million per week at “border town dispensaries”—marijuana retailers located close to Idaho in neighboring states where cannabis is legal—and contribute 10 percent “of all Oregon’s legal and taxed sales annually,” the email said.

Home cultivation would also be allowed under the proposal, with the number of plants capped at 12. Adults could keep up to 8 ounces of marijuana harvested from those plants so long as it’s secured at home or on private property and is inaccessible to minors.

The proposal, which was amended this month from an earlier version to incorporate feedback from the state attorney general, is clear that it would not legalize commercial activity around cannabis.

“Nothing in this section,” it says, “shall be construed to allow private or commercial sale or resale of any controlled substance.”

Kind Idaho still has quite a bit of time to qualify the prospective measure for the state’s 2026 ballot, with signatures due back to officials by the end of April of that year. Organizers will have to gather 70,725 valid voter signatures statewide, representing 6 percent of qualified voters in the state as of the last general election.

Idaho requires that campaigns also collect signatures representing at least 6 percent of registered voters in 18 of 35 legislative districts across the state.

For now, the campaign has no plans to hire paid signature gatherers.

“It’s all grassroots,” Joe Evans, the treasurer and a lead organizer for the effort told Marijuana Moment this week. Hiring professionals to circulate petitions in Idaho can cost between $4 and $8 per signature, he added, which the campaign simply doesn’t have the resources to cover.

Evans said he’s encouraging volunteers to familiarize themselves with the measure over Thanksgiving and the weekend, with plans to start gathering signatures in earnest as December begins.

People have already volunteered in a handful of counties, but the campaign is still looking for more volunteers to collect signatures, have petitions notarized, turn them into county clerks for validation, collect them from the clerk and then mail them to the campaign.

The new effort is a revised attempt at cannabis reform following years of unsuccessfully trying to legalize a more extensively regulated medical marijuana system in the state. Kind Idaho, which previously introduced medical marijuana ballot measures intended to go before voters in both the 2022 and 2024 elections, is hopeful a more narrowly focused bill might be more palatable to voters.

A poll from about two years ago, Evans told Marijuana Moment in an earlier interview, showed about 65 percent support for medical marijuana legalization in the state and nearly 80 percent support for ending penalties for personal use. By contrast, only about 40 percent of respondents backed commercial legalization of cannabis for adults.

So far, he said this week, feedback on the change in strategy from volunteers and other supporters has been positive.

“They’re actually responding fairly well,” he said, noting that people have said they appreciate that they wouldn’t have to register with the state to use marijuana therapeutically and wouldn’t have to welcome the commercial cannabis industry into Idaho.

“Most people are still close enough that they can take advantage of legal sales in other states,” Evans said. “They’re not registering for a medical card and risking various state agencies interfering with their personal and private lives over their choice of medicine.”

“It’s a nice, simple initiative,” he added. “It’s not complicated. It’s easy to understand.”

Officials’ newly issued short ballot title reads as follow:

Measure decriminalizing the possession, production, and cultivation of marijuana and marijuana-infused products for personal use by persons 21 or older.

The long ballot title, meanwhile, includes more details about the proposal:

This measure proposes that the possession of marijuana (or “cannabis”) and marijuana-infused products be decriminalized under certain limitations. To be legally possessed, marijuana and marijuana-infused products must be for personal use — not sale or resale, cannot be consumed in public or open settings, and cannot be possessed by persons under 21 years of age. The marijuana possessed must weigh less than one ounce and the marijuana-infused product possessed must contain less than 1,000 milligrams of THC.

The production and cultivation of marijuana or marijuana-infused products have the same personal use, location, and age restrictions as set forth above. Such substances must also be secured “in the primary residence or on the property thereof” and “from access by members of the household under 21 years of age.” A maximum of 12 marijuana plants or eight ounces of marijuana-infused product can be possessed for production or cultivation. Conduct authorized by the measure is exempt from penalties under Title 37, Chapter 27, ldaho Code (Uniform Controlled Substances), and from taxes and penalties under Title 63, Chapter 42, Idaho Code (Illegal Drug Stamp Tax Act). The measure shall not be construed to allow private or commercial sale or resale of any controlled substance.

In 2021, a separate group of activists began gathering signatures for a similar ballot initiative that would have allowed adults to possess up to 3 ounces of marijuana on private property, though home cultivation would have been prohibited.

Though the measure didn’t make Idaho’s ballot, the idea was for consumers to be able to buy cannabis in neighboring states that have legal retail operations and then bring back the product to be consumed privately at home.

“All we’re asking [voters] to do is to accept what people were already doing: driving across the border legally purchasing marijuana and bringing it home to smoke,” organizer Russ Belville said at the time. “If Idaho still wants to give away the tax money, that’s fine. But we shouldn’t spend more tax money trying to arrest people in a futile attempt to stop them.”

Lawmakers in Idaho, meanwhile, have in recent months weighed ways to further tighten the state’s prohibition on marijuana.

A bill from Rep. Bruce Skaug (R) earlier this year, for example, would have set a $420 mandatory minimum fine for cannabis possession, removing judges’ discretion to apply lower penalties. Skaug said the bill, which ultimately stalled in committee, would send the message that Idaho is tough on marijuana.

House lawmakers also passed a bill to ban marijuana advertisements, though the Senate later defeated the measure.

As for Kind Idaho’s latest medical cannabis proposal, the campaign submitted initial paperwork for the initiative back in 2022, noting that the proposal was “essentially identical” to one the group filed two years earlier but which similarly failed to make the ballot.

Read the full ballot title and summary for the proposed marijuana initiative below:

DEA Judge Won’t Remove Agency From Marijuana Rescheduling Hearing, But Raises Concerns About Alleged Unlawful Contact With Prohibitionists