4/20 Day ahead. Is weed legal in Florida? Here's what to know about marijuana laws
Easter Sunday and 4/20 are on the same day this year. "4/20" is cannabis culture slang for marijuana consumption, which makes April 20 (or 4/20) the designated holiday for stoners across the globe.
The holidays have coincided several times before, predating the smokers' holiday, and it will happen again in 62 years. But for celebrating 4/20, can you actually light up in Florida?
Weed, Maryjane and ganja, oh my!
Marijuana is a greenish-gray mixture of the dried flowers from the Cannabis sativa or Cannabis indica plant, according to the National Institute of Drug Use.
The main psychoactive chemical in marijuana, responsible for most of the intoxicating effects that people seek, is delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. The chemical is found in resin produced by the leaves and buds primarily of the female cannabis plant.
The true origin of why marijuana lovers spark up on 4/20 (or even associate the time 4:20 with smoking pot) isn't clear, but there are two rumored possibilities:
The unofficial story of a group of high school students in the 1970s in California, who allegedly would meet to smoke pot every day at 4:20 p.m. However, this has never been confirmed.
According to a Vox article on the origins of the holiday, 'One common belief is that 420 was the California police or penal code for marijuana, but there's no evidence to support those claims."
No, you cannot.
Despite receiving 55.9% of votes, Amendment 3 did not achieve the 60% threshold needed to pass during the 2024 General Election. It saw 5,934,139 votes in total.
Medical marijuana is legal in Florida for residents diagnosed with a specific set of conditions who have applied for and received a Medical Marijuana ID Card or caregivers who have received a Medical Marijuana Caregiver Card.
Here are following conditions eiliglbe for and to receive a Medical Marijuana Card:
Cancer
Epilepsy
Glaucoma
HIV (human immunodeficiency virus)
AIDS (Acquired immune deficiency syndrome)
PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)
ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis)
Crohn's disease
Parkinson's disease
Multiple sclerosis
Comparable medical conditions or status to the above
A terminal condition
Chronic nonmalignant pain
No. The state of Florida does not offer reciprocity, although a bill filed for this year's legislative session would change that if passed.
Without a Medical Marijuana Card (or Medical Marijuana Caregiver Card, for people assisting medical marijuana patients who are minors or who need help), if you are caught with pot, marijuana advocacy group NORML lists the following penalties under Florida Statutes:
Possessing 20 grams or less: first-degree misdemeanor, up to one year in jail and maximum $1,000 fine.
Possession of paraphernalia: Misdemeanor, up to one year in jail and maximum $1,000 fine.
Possessing marijuana within 1,000 feet of a school, college, park or other specified areas: Felony, mandatory three-year sentence and maximum $10,000 fine.
Possessing from 20 grams: to 25 pounds: Felony, up to five years in jail and maximum $5,000 fine.
Possessing from 25 to 2,000 pounds of marijuana: First-degree felony, from three to 15 years in jail and $25,000 fine.
Possessing from 2,000 to 10,000 pounds of marijuana: First-degree felony, from seven to 30 years and $50,000 fine.
Possessing more than 10,000 pounds of marijuana: First-degree felony, from 15 to 30 years and $200,000 fine.
However, many communities and municipalities have decriminalized possession of up to 20 grams of marijuana, meaning if you're busted you'll get a fine (which will go up each time) and you may be required to attend a drug education program or do community service.
Areas that have decriminalized pot include Alachua County, Broward County, Cocoa Beach, Hallandale Beach, Key West, Miami Beach, Miami-Dade County, Orlando, Osceola County, Palm Beach County, Port Richey, Sarasota, Tampa and Volusia County.
Only licensed medical marijuana dispensaries may sell marijuana in the state of Florida. Even if the proposed recreational amendment passes next year, you still would have to buy your pot at a licensed dispensary.
People charged with selling marijuana can face the following:
25 grams or less, without renumeration: Misdemeanor, maximum 1 year in jail, $1,000 fine.
20 grams to 25 pounds: Felony, maximum 5 years in jail, $5,000 fine.
25 to less than 2,000 pounds or 300-2,000 plants: Felony, three to 15 years, maximum $25,000 fine.
2,000 to less than 10,000 pounds or 2,000-10,000 plants: Felony, seven to 30 years, maximum $50,000 fine.
10,000 pounds or more: Felony, 15 to 30 years, maximum $200,000 fine.
If within 1,000 feet of a school, college, park, or other specified areas: An additional 3-15 years, $10,000 fine
Assorted different types of so-called "diet weed" cannabinoids such as delta-8, delta-9, delta-10 and THC-O, which are derived from hemp and not marijuana and contain lower levels of THC, are sort-of legal here under the 2018 federal Farm Bill that allows farmers to grow industrial hemp.
Last year, the Florida Legislature passed a bill, SB 1698, that effectively banned delta-8 and delta-10 products and placed a 5-milligram-delta-9 concentration limit per serving but Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed it, reportedly to protect small businesses. However, they remain federally illegal.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Marijuana laws in Florida 2025: What to know before 4/20 day
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is a senior writer at Future Perfect, Vox's effective altruism-inspired section on the world's biggest challenges. She explores wide-ranging topics like climate change, artificial intelligence, vaccine development, and factory farms, and also writes the Future Perfect newsletter. How many people are going to die because of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency's abolition of USAID, and the Trump administration's apparently-under-consideration plans to destroy PEPFAR, the landmark George W. Bush-era program to end the global AIDS epidemic? Millions — everyone agrees on that. But how many millions is an extraordinarily difficult question to answer. Two factors make it particularly difficult. First, the Trump administration's plans are constantly shifting. And second, other actors change their behavior in response to US policy. 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The lower-end estimate is in line with other estimates — and even the higher end, it isn't necessarily impossible, if no other actors step in. This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. But there were limitations to the paper's approach that make it a bad idea to take those numbers at face value. The analysis drew criticism from some development economists, who warned that its approach was insufficiently rigorous, given the stakes of getting this right. Its design meant that the death toll estimate didn't account for the potential impacts of other governments or aid agencies stepping in to help make up for cuts to USAID, among other issues. It also claimed that USAID had saved up to 90 million people over the last few decades, which would, implausibly, credit the agency with the entire fall in global mortality over the last 20 years. All that is an immense shame — it's already hard enough to get Americans to pay attention to desperately needed aid going to some of the poorest people in the world. Overestimates undermine the credibility of the entire effort to fix this crisis — credibility that it can't afford to lose. Counting the dead During the chaotic initial months, as DOGE implemented cuts by unilaterally blocking payments, it was almost impossible to distinguish what was an intended cut and what had been cut off accidentally. At the time, I sent questions about the situation to the State Department, which answered only with copy-pasted statements unrelated to my questions. Often the only way to learn whether a PEPFAR clinic was operating was to ask a volunteer to go there and look — and volunteers in Nigeria did precisely that for me at one point. As I tried to report on which programs were operating, I spoke with people whose programs were canceled and then uncanceled and then sometimes recanceled. We're now out of that initial chaos. But determining what's going on remains a huge challenge. By far the most important single question for how many people die as a consequence of aid cuts is whether PEPFAR is gutted or continues to function. Last week, we got good news on that front: Congress exempted PEPFAR from a recent package of spending cuts that had been pushed by the White House. This week, we got bad news: The State Department, according to documents obtained by the New York Times, is developing a plan to shut down the program anyway. The department has since distanced itself from the plan, stating that the document 'is not reflective of the State Department's policy on PEPFAR.' Related Bill Gates shows what the end of perpetual philanthropy looks like Any death toll estimate has to assume a specific scenario — anywhere from 'everything is canceled' to 'only certain announced cancellations will go forward, and everything else proceeds as before.' And it also has to make difficult methodological assumptions. As a recent analysis by development economists Charles Kenny and Justin Sandefur put it, we need to know both 'gross lives saved' — how many lifesaving medications were given out to patients who then survived? — and 'net lives saved' — how many of those people are alive today who would have been dead but for the program? Gross lives saved are relatively easy to measure. Net lives saved are much trickier — they're often estimated by comparing deaths in countries that benefitted from US aid to those in countries that did not. But since those countries weren't identical to begin with, and the US hardly chooses where it operates at random, deciding what differences between the countries to control for introduces a lot of potential for error. The more variables you control for, the easier it is to accidentally control for something that you would have actually wanted to consider in your results. The Lancet study, for example, controlled for health spending by country. But controlling for that variable makes it impossible to look at cases where US aid spending displaced a country's own national spending on health — meaning that it's impossible to see how much US aid was actually improving the total health situation or just substituting for local money. And that was just one concern with the study, representative of just how hard it is to do this research. Why this really, really matters According to the State Department's own estimate, PEPFAR has saved about 25 million lives since it began operating in 2004. Earlier this year, some friends and I, hoping to better understand that estimate, ran a hackathon to create our own analysis, estimating that the program has saved between 19 million and 30 million lives. Meanwhile, Kenny and Sandefur estimate that all US aid programs as a whole saved between 2.3 million and 5.6 million lives per year, the bulk of that from PEPFAR. What we know for sure is this: More people will die than you or I could ever meet. Even with the most rigorous research standards, the range of uncertainty is very large, and the numbers hinge on hard-to-communicate assumptions. Do you exclude data from the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, given its confounding effects? Do you treat saving a child and saving an adult as the same? Do you assume drug prices would have fallen and made medication more accessible even without US aid? And do you report your conservative estimate or your high-end estimate? This isn't just an academic exercise. Because for the most part, you get one shot at communicating with the general public. There's a lot happening in the world, and most people simply aren't going to read five news stories about the nuances of foreign aid. Having an authoritative number would be invaluable for conveying the scale of the impending crisis — and it must be a reliable one, because an unrigorous overestimate just hands opponents an excuse to dismiss the entire foreign aid project as one run by politically motivated liars. But the sheer chaos of the dismantlement, the lack of clarity about what the plan really is, and the difficulty in guessing how other governments and nonprofits will react (when they're dealing with the same lack of clarity from the US) makes it hard to give a single answer. And it's really hard to advocate for a program's continuation when it's impossible to keep track of the government's plans for it. I strongly suspect that's intentional: The White House has repeatedly lost when seeking congressional approval to dismantle our best-performing life-saving programs. So the administration has resorted to doing it piecewise and, as much as possible, avoiding a public debate. What we know for sure is this: More people will die than you or I could ever meet. It's enough people that I am pretty sure we'll be able to see a Trump-era spike on global child mortality graphs the way we can see the impacts of major wars. Most of the dead will be children whose lives could be saved at very little cost. And whether we save their lives next year is apparently, somehow, still under discussion.
