Municipalities and residents have been given a great responsibility to set public health policy. Community policies impact everyone in a town, regardless of individual opinions and viewpoints and can have long and lasting implications for that community and the region. Currently many communities are asking their residents to vote to opt in to having retail cannabis stores in their community. These are separate adult only, cannabis only stores. This is a decision that should be done with much thought about how it will impact your town and the youth in your community.

We’ve compiled some resources to help you be an informed voter as you cast your ballot or if you want to know more:

If you’d like to be more involved in shaping what retail cannabis might look like for your community here are a few options:

  • Be part of creating your town’s vision for what may happen if your town votes to opt-in to retail cannabis.
  • Create a cannabis research task force or workgroup to gather information and share back with your community.
  • If your town opts in, find out if your town plans to form a Cannabis Control Commission (CCC) to put in place additional regulations and/or criteria for licensees based on input from different stakeholders.
  • If you are interested in diving into the topic of preventing youth cannabis use, it will be the topic of our Healthy Lamoille Valley Coalition meeting on March 10th from 3:30-4:45pm. Please email jessica@healthylamoillevalley.org for the zoom invite.

Remember, once a town votes to opt in to a cannabis market, they can vote to opt out later (yet established retailers that began after the original opt in get to stay). If a town votes, municipalities may call another vote to be planned in the future to give the community the opportunity to weigh in again and potentially reverse the current vote (either direction). If an opt-In vote is reversed, existing retail operations are allowed to stay by “legacy rights”.

For more information, contact Alison Link at alison@healthylamoillevalley.org or visit our information page here.