What’s the status of Virginia’a cannabis laws? We’ve collected your questions and answered them in this marijuana FAQ.
We hear a lot about political realignment, but not so much about musical realignment.
In the 1960s, rock music glamorized marijuana while country music did not. Indeed, the country song that most epitomized the condemnation of weed was Merle Haggard’s classic “Okie from Muskogee,” which starts right off with “we don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee.”
My, how things have changed.
Today, if you’re looking for a song about weed, you’d best turn to a country radio station. When Chris Stapleton — last year’s national anthem singer at the Super Bowl, so not exactly some social outcast — sings, “I take a little smoke in the evening …” on “The Devil Always Made Me Think Twice,” he’s probably not talking about a pack of Winstons.
Ashley Monroe is more direct. “Bring me weed instead of roses, bring me whiskey instead of wine,” she sings. “I don’t need a card from Hallmark, box of candy has a note, Heaven knows, bring me weed instead of roses, and let’s see where it goes.”
I started making a list of popular country musicians with songs about cannabis and quickly gave up because there are so many: Brandy Clark, Eric Church, Florida Georgia Line, Jamey Johnson, Toby Keith, Blake Shelton, Molly Tuttle, Hank Williams Jr. and, well, you get the idea. Even Haggard changed his tune before his death, recording a song with Willie Nelson called “It’s All Going to Pot.” Just in case there’s any misunderstanding about the meaning, the official video shows the pair sharing a joint.
This is all quite relevant to upcoming debates in Virginia’s General Assembly. Conservatives like to say that “politics is downstream from culture,” which is often why there’s so much focus on the so-called “culture wars.” The theory is if you want to change politics, first you change the culture. Feel free to debate all that, although one example of it occurred in last month’s Ohio referendum on whether to legalize marijuana. Ohio didn’t just vote “yes,” so did some rural parts of the state, which suggests that the culture there regarding cannabis has already changed. The aforementioned country singers are merely reflecting that; so, too, do the results of Ohio Issue 2.
That relates to Virginia in this way: Virginia has legalized personal possession of cannabis (today’s preferred term) but has not authorized a legal retail market, meaning all the money Virginians are spending on weed goes into a black market of, well, drug dealers. One of the many issues that the new legislature will take up next month is whether to create a legal retail market of licensed growers, processors and stores. Democrats have been for this for some time, Republicans less so, although their opposition hasn’t always been a clear-cut “no.” Some Republicans no doubt feel that way, but others of a more libertarian bent have made it clear that they’re fine creating a legal retail market — they just disagree with Democrats on how to go about it. (Democrats have wanted to give first preference on licenses to those previously convicted of marijuana offenses as a way of making amends; Republicans think that’s just rewarding law-breaking.) For some Republicans, the reluctance to move forward on cannabis is no doubt political — what would their conservative voters think?
The Ohio results show quite plainly that, in many places, conservative voters are quite fine with legal cannabis. Here’s the short version: Ohio has 88 counties. In 2020, just seven of them voted for Democrat Joe Biden as the state went Republican for the fourth time in six years. In 2023, however, 31 counties voted in favor of legal weed — those seven Democratic counties plus 24 others that had voted for Donald Trump. That might lead some Virginia Republicans to wonder whether their districts might be OK with legal weed.
This is not an unusual phenomenon. I’ve written before about how some conservative voters in some states — Arkansas, Oklahoma, South Dakota — have signaled their willingness to accept legal weed. I’ve even run the math to try to project which localities in Virginia might vote to allow legal retail sales, if given the opportunity. (Since there’s no bill introduced yet, we don’t know what it might say but previous versions have allowed localities to hold referendums if they wanted to opt out of local sales.)
So, building on that previous work, what does the Ohio vote tell us? Quite a bit, and not just about cannabis.
Ohio held referendums on two things: Issue 2 was about legal weed but Issue 1 was to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution.
That pro-abortion rights amendment passed in 18 counties that had voted for Trump in 2020, signaling that not all Republicans are on board with restricting access to abortion. We’re not talking marginal counties, either, but some that had voted for Trump by landslide margins. For instance, Licking County in the center of the state voted 63.2% for Trump and 50.7% for abortion rights. Fairfield County next door voted 61% for Trump and 51.3% for abortion rights. Geauga County outside Cleveland went 61% for Trump and 54.6% for abortion rights. These numbers aren’t unusual, either; we’ve seen similar voting trends in other referendums this year in Kansas and Kentucky. The Virginia Democrats who now hold majorities in the General Assembly are hopeful of sending a constitutional amendment on abortion rights to voters in 2026 (our amendment process is a multi-year one). These votes in other states suggest that such an amendment will most likely pass in Virginia, even in some 60% to 63% Trump localities such as Roanoke County (59.9% Trump), Covington (60.7% Trump) and Hanover County (62.4% Trump). However, I’d caution Democrats against thinking these results portend a Democratic victory in next year’s presidential race. It’s one thing to vote on an issue, another to vote on a personality. Put another way, it’s easier for a pro-abortion rights Republican to vote for a single-issue referendum than it is to vote for a Democratic candidate who might do lots of other things that the voter might disagree with.
In any case, such a constitutional amendment in Virginia is several years away while a vote on legal cannabis could come in the new year, so let’s focus on that.
Here’s where the Ohio results get even more interesting: Thirteen counties that voted “no” on abortion rights voted “yes” on legal weed. Eight of those are in the part of southern Ohio that’s officially classified as part of Appalachia — and other Appalachian counties in Ohio that still voted “no” on cannabis did so with a much lower share of the vote than they produced on the abortion rights amendment.
While most Republican-voting counties in Ohio were consistently anti-abortion and anti-weed (albeit with more enthusiasm against abortion than against weed), Appalachian counties often had a very different vote pattern — against the abortion rights amendment but for legal marijuana.
If you’re hearing Steve Earle’s pro-pot anthem “Copperhead Road” in your head, there’s a good reason. In the song, he describes the son of a moonshiner from Appalachia who “came home with a brand new plan / I take the seed from Colombia and Mexico / I just plant it up the holler down Copperhead Road.” These voters in Ohio’s Appalachian counties are essentially voting the way Steve Earle sang.
Let’s take a look:
Lawrence County, Ohio, is wedged up against the Ohio River across from both Kentucky and West Virginia. That makes it one of the most Appalachian counties in the state. It voted 72.2% for Trump in 2020, making it similar, vote-wise, to Appomattox County and Augusta County in Virginia. Lawrence County voted 66% “no” on the abortion rights amendment — but 51.6% “yes” on legal weed.
Meigs County, a little further upstream on the Ohio River, voted 75.9% for Trump — almost the same as our Washington County (75.6%) and not terribly different from our Page County (74.7%) or Giles County (74.9%). Meigs voted 63.9% “no” on abortion rights — but 52% “yes” on legal weed.
Vinton County next door is even more conservative. It voted 76.9% for Trump, which would be close to our Smyth County (77.5%) and Wythe County (77.8%). Vinton County voted 62.5% against the abortion rights amendment but 52% in favor of legal weed.
In my earlier analysis, I concluded that based on the votes in other states, much of Virginia would approve legal cannabis stores if given the chance, but most localities in Southwest Virginia would not. Based on the Ohio vote, I’ll have to revise that analysis because clearly some Ohio counties that would seem similar to many Southwest Virginia counties just voted in favor. Interestingly, these vote shifts were not replicated in some Republican counties in other parts of Ohio. Take Williams County, in the northwest corner bounded by Indiana and Michigan. It voted 72.1% for Trump, which makes it almost identical to Lawrence County on the opposite end of the Buckeye State. But where Lawrence voted 51.6% for legal cannabis, Williams voted only 43.3% “yes” on that question.
We see similar vote patterns across Ohio. In otherwise conservative Appalachian counties, there was much more enthusiasm for legal cannabis than there was in conservative counties elsewhere. Of the 32 Ohio counties that are classified as Appalachian, 11 voted in favor of legal marijuana and eight others saw the vote stay close, with “no” polling 53% of the vote or less. I can only speculate as to why these Appalachian counties were so amenable to cannabis while their equally conservative counterparts elsewhere in the state weren’t. Regardless of the answer, I can imagine some Republican legislators in Virginia who are looking for a sign as to how their constituents feel on the subject, might be studying these Ohio returns and wondering: Is my 70%-plus Republican county more like those 70% Republican Ohio counties that voted for cannabis or the 70% Republican ones that voted against it?