“I got the cultivatin’ music that be captivating he
Who listens to the words that I speak
As I take me a drink to the middle of the street”
“Gin and Juice” — Snoop Dogg

Incredibly, 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of the release of “Gin and Juice” from Snoop Dogg’s debut album, “Doggystyle.”

The song was immediately well-received, reaching No. 8 in the Billboard Hot 100, was certified gold, and received a nomination for a Grammy Award for best rap solo performance. The song was even performed for the American Music Awards’ 1994 awards show.

The song may be most famous for a throwaway line in the song, “with my mind on my money and my money on my mind.” That line has been quoted in multiple other songs and also in multiple television shows and movies, on top of a Broadway musical in 2018 that featured multiple Snoop Dogg hit songs as the soundtrack.

The focus of the lyrics is a party where a teenage Snoop takes part in sexual acts with multiple partners while drinking hard liquor and smoking marijuana.

For the third time, South Dakota voters will go to the polls in November (or before that if you choose to participate in early voting available at your local county auditor’s office) to vote on legalizing recreational marijuana.

In 2020, voters approved Constitutional Amendment A with 54% of the vote in favor of legalizing recreational marijuana.

The state had overwhelmingly supported Initiated Measure 26 in the same election, which legalized medicinal marijuana, with 70% of the state’s votes approving medicinal cannabis.

However, Amendment A was struck down in court as unconstitutional, and Initiated Measure 27 was on the ballot in 2022 to once again approve recreational marijuana, receiving the support of 47% of voters.

This year’s initiated measure does clean up some language that voters found difficult in IM 27, but in large part, the measure is very similar to IM 27.

Yet, we’re again at the point where the state’s voters are making the choice whether or not to legalize recreational marijuana.

If South Dakota were to legalize recreational marijuana in November, the state would become the 25th across the country (as well as Washington, D.C.) to legalize the possession and personal use of marijuana.

North Dakota and Florida also have the measure on the ballot this year, meaning that if all three states pass this year, 28 states will have legalized recreational marijuana.

To say that there is notable momentum toward a change in marijuana’s classification at the national level is putting it mildly.

This past April, the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) approved a proposal to move marijuana from a Schedule 1 narcotic to Schedule III, meaning that the DEA recognizes a low level of potential addiction and abuse and also recognizes medicinal uses for marijuana.

However, even with that change, marijuana is still illegal at a federal level. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would likely have to change its ruling on marijuana as a substance for medicinal use before anything could change at a federal level to fully legalize marijuana.

The FDA has yet to take that action, though it has considered the topic recently and have consideration for medicinal marijuana reclassification on the 2025 agenda within the agency.

One of the major arguments for proponents of marijuana is the substance’s benefits and negatives are similar, or in some cases “better,” than alcohol, which is currently legal in all 50 states.

In fact, the American Addiction Centers did an extensive amount of polling on the topic of marijuana versus alcohol.
With more than 1,000 respondents, more than 57% of surveyed stated that if they had to choose one of marijuana or alcohol to be legalized, they would choose alcohol.

The incredible part is that throughout the rest of the survey, perception responses showed that significantly higher percentages of people had negative views of those who used marijuana than they did of those who use alcohol.

While there are notable health issues with alcohol consumption, marijuana consumption has its own downfalls for health, as daily marijuana use increases risk of stroke by 42% and risk of heart attack by 25% in a 2024 study done by the American Heart Association.

One of the major claims of those who are opposed to recreational cannabis simply doesn’t stand up to objective scientific scrutiny, however.

There are studies, funded by anti-marijuana groups, that show the substance to be physically addictive and to be what is known as a “gateway drug.” Objective studies have found that a person is no more likely to use Schedule 1 narcotic after use of marijuana than he or she is with no other drug use. In fact, there is a stronger correlation between tobacco use and Schedule 1 narcotic use in a 2023 study done by Yale University.

The Yale study did verify that cannabis is, in fact, addictive, though many lower-schedule drugs would have a similar use-to-addiction rate as cannabis’ 10% rate, and also shows that the addiction is a psychological addiction, not a physical/chemical one.

Think of it like this - when supply lines are clean, water flows easier. Marijuana, for lack of a better description, helps clear the pipes in the brain.

The same study also found that marijuana addiction seems to follow a hereditary line. A study by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism found a similar 10% rate of those who drink alcohol to those who become addicted to the drug.

While claims from those in opposition have labeled the funding of IM 29’s support campaign to be from a high portion of out-of-state donors, the support committee behind the ballot measure lists multiple South Dakota medical marijuana companies as its largest financial backers.

The state currently has hemp and medicinal marijuana legalized. Amendment A put in some additional language that restricted enforcement by our state’s law enforcement, and that was part of the language that eventually led to its overturn.

This measure allows for the legislature and even local communities to consider how to enforce legalization.

The major difference to me between IM 26, which legalized medicinal marijuana, and this measure is the detail that IM 26 put forth to give guidelines to both the state and municipalities on flexibility within the law that could allow for a “dry” county if that was the vote of the county’s oversight board.

It also laid out very strict security and certification required of any medical marijuana dispensaries that would open in the state. Further legislation in Pierre has cleaned up some definitions and added some clarification not initially laid out in IM 26.

A potential argument against IM 29 is that it does not offer the same level of definition to what a recreational marijuana program would look like, which will mean legislators in Pierre would likely take pen and paper to further define and restrict the law if it did pass — perhaps making some choices that advocates for IM 29 may not appreciate.

Many on the pro-recreational use side tout the additional tax dollars that would come from legalization, but the bigger financial boon to the state very likely would come from not spending an incredible amount of money on housing inmates who are in jail for non-violent offenses. This would be one step toward that, though South Dakota would remain one of the few states in the nation that makes simple possession of a controlled substance a felony, leading to much of the spending on incarcerating non-violent offenders.

That’s a whole other column, however, and on this issue, it often feels like Snoop’s quoted line above, where the writer talks about people not hearing the message he’s trying to get out in his music, so he goes into the middle of the street to lay down his comments.

At this point, most folks are fairly engrained in how they view the issue, both the support and opposition sides alike.

Quite frankly, if this doesn’t pass in November, we’re likely not done hearing about recreational marijuana in the state. Finding a path that reaches legalization in a manner that also allows for local communities to set the standards to enforce legalization is probably the best way forward, and it could be done with the passage of IM 29 and work in Pierre as well, though giving legislators some guardrails to work within would be wise as well.