Marijuana advocates fail to collect enough signatures on time to block DeWine-signed bill

Ohio will now re-criminalize marijuana on Friday after pro-marijuana advocates failed to collect enough signatures before the Thursday deadline to block the marijuana and hemp regulations included in Senate Bill 56, which Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed in December and takes effect on Friday.

To get on the ballot, the campaign would have had to collect approximately 250,000 signatures from at least 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties, according to Cleveland.com.

“We want to thank more than 5,000 Ohioans and businesses who volunteered their time and sweat to try to collect the signatures needed to put SB 56 before voters,” Ohioans for Cannabis Choice wrote in a Wednesday statement on X. “Unfortunately, we were not able to overcome a truncated time period to give voters the chance to say no to government overreach.”

A statement from the No on SB 56 campaign. pic.twitter.com/aELKX6RQrw

— Ohioans for Cannabis Choice (@OH4cannabis) March 18, 2026

The organization also wrote in the statement that “businesses will close, workers will lose their jobs, and consumers will be denied their right to products they should be able to purchase” after the Ohio government bans marijuana.

“Voters overwhelmingly supported legalizing cannabis in 2023,” the organization wrote, referencing what was called Issue 2 at the time.

The pro-marijuana group also wrote that “it only makes sense” for DeWine and the state lawmakers to “go back and ask those voters if they want to ban hemp and re-criminalize marijuana.”

“We know, and our elected leaders know, the answer would be a resounding no,” they added.

However, DeWine previously disagreed with that assessment, saying that the passing of the bill is “very consistent with what the average voter was thinking,” according to the Statehouse News Bureau.

When the Statehouse News Bureau asked Ohioans for Cannabis Choice spokesperson Dennis Willard how many signatures the organization had collected to block SB 56, which was introduced by state Sen. Stephen A. Huffman, R-Tipp City, he refused to answer.

Huffman told Cleveland.com that he wasn’t surprised that the effort to block his bill failed.

“In the dead of winter in Ohio, it is very difficult. There’s no festival, there’s not a lot of outdoor activities where a large group of people could gather to do it,” he said. “And it was a concentration on the beverages, and it really didn’t have almost anything to do with the ballot initiative and marijuana, as they tried to make it out to be. In being so narrow like that, I just think it was really hard to achieve their goal.”

Huffman’s Republican colleague, state Rep. Tex Fischer, R-Boardman, however, opposed the bill for the same reason that was presented by the pro-marijuana group – the bill becoming law would result in many marijuana-related businesses being shut down and Ohioans losing their jobs, according to Cleveland.com.

“I am disappointed we haven’t acted already,” he said. “The bill would never have passed without those provisions, and if we don’t act, thousands of Ohio jobs and hundreds of businesses will be needlessly lost at the end of this week.”

According to the Statehouse News Bureau, “Ohioans haven’t overturned a law via the ballot since 2011, when they voted to overturn Senate Bill 5, which restricted collective bargaining by public sector unions, from police unions to teachers unions.”