Voters signaled unease on Tuesday over the country’s loosening drug laws, as hard-fought quests to legalize recreational marijuana in Florida and the therapeutic use of certain psychedelics in Massachusetts fell short.
In North Dakota, residents also rejected a ballot initiative that would have made it the 25th state to legalize recreational cannabis. Voters in Nebraska did opt to expand access to marijuana, but only for medicinal purposes. Results of a similar measure in South Dakota were still being counted on Wednesday.
Beau Kilmer, a drug policy expert at the RAND Corporation, a nonpartisan think tank, cautioned against viewing the outcomes as a meaningful shift from the pattern of expanding legalization of drugs in recent years. He said that support for legalizing cannabis has grown steadily in this country, noting, for instance, that earlier attempts to legalize recreational marijuana in North Dakota had been rejected by wider margins than it was on Tuesday.
“We have to be really careful about making sweeping generalizations about drug policy based on these results,” Mr. Kilmer said. “You have to look at what happened in each place.”
Florida’s initiative failed, even though it was supported by a majority of voters. About 56 percent of voters supported the ballot measure to legalize recreational marijuana, falling short of the 60 percent threshold required for a constitutional amendment.
The vote in Florida followed an expensive and contentious campaign that divided Republicans: Gov. Ron DeSantis strongly opposed the measure, known as Amendment 3, while Donald J. Trump supported it.
“This pro-drug amendment was bad for our kids, bad for our communities, bad for our local business and ultimately bad for Florida,” Mark Wilson, the president and C.E.O. of the Florida Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement.
Groups that favor legalizing marijuana criticized Mr. DeSantis for spending millions in taxpayer funds on public-service ads warning about the harms of cannabis.
“This isn’t the end in Florida. It’s just the beginning since we’ve now seen how strongly the push for legalization resonates in the state,” said Josh Glasstetter, a spokesman for the U.S. Cannabis Council, which favors legalization.
The ballot initiatives coincided with a presidential election in which both leading candidates signaled support for removing cannabis from the federal government’s most restrictive category of drugs. During the final weeks of the campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris went further, saying she supported making marijuana legal under federal law.
The Florida ballot measure proposed making it legal for people 21 and older to possess up to three ounces of marijuana. It would have allowed the state’s medical marijuana dispensaries to sell cannabis products for recreational use. Voters legalized medical marijuana in Florida in 2016.
Mr. DeSantis expressed concern that legalizing recreational use of marijuana would encourage its use and create a nuisance for Floridians and visitors.
“You shouldn’t have to explain to a first grader what that smell is, like you have to do in Denver and New York City,” the governor said at a recent news conference.
Mr. Trump, who resides in Florida, announced in September that he would vote in favor of the measure, saying in a social media post that “it is time to end needless arrests and incarcerations of adults for small amounts of marijuana for personal use.”
Under Florida law, possession of up to 20 grams of cannabis for other than medical purposes is a first-degree misdemeanor punishable by up to a year’s imprisonment. Prosecutors in the state charged more than 16,000 people last year with possessing small amounts of marijuana, according to The Tampa Bay Times.
The organizers of the initiative in Massachusetts had hoped to follow the lead of Oregon and Colorado, where voters in recent years approved measures to administer the use of psychedelic mushrooms in licensed centers.
They faced opposition from the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society, which warned that for some patients struggling with depression and trauma, psychedelics may be more destabilizing than healing. The measure, which required a majority to pass, was rejected by nearly 57 percent of voters.
“We will keep fighting to find new pathways for all those who struggle with their mental health and look forward to working with legislators in the new session to continue advocating for access, for hope and for healing,” Massachusetts for Mental Health Options, the group that led the initiative, said in a statement on Tuesday night.
While polls showed that the measure had wide support during the early months of the campaign, leading medical experts argued that it was too broad. Dr. Nassir Ghaemi, the president of the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society, said that the therapeutic value of psychedelics had not been conclusively established.
“The harms are clear and well known,” said Dr. Ghaemi, who is also a psychiatry professor at Tufts University. “And the harms clearly outweigh the benefits.”
The measure would have allowed residents to grow and possess a limited list of naturally occurring mind-altering compounds, including psychedelic mushrooms; forms of DMT, or Dimethyltryptamine, the psychoactive component in ayahuasca; and ibogaine, which comes from an African shrub. While the initiative did not seek to authorize retail sales of those compounds, it would have allowed people to seek treatment with them at licensed centers under the guidance of trained personnel.
“People that are not even functional, that can’t even get out of bed, have been healed through these therapies, and really, we don’t have time to wait,” said Dr. Hannah McLane, a physician who was one of the campaign’s organizers. “We have so many people in really dire circumstances.”
Nebraska was a rare place where advocates of loosening drug laws had a victory on Tuesday. More than 70 percent of voters approved a measure allowing the possession of up to five ounces of cannabis by patients with qualifying conditions.
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