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It is very likely that one way or another medical marijuana will finally become legal in Massachusetts. A new poll by Public Policy Polling found that a majority of voters in the state would vote for a medical marijuana initiative, and there is a very good chance such measure will be on the ballot this November. From PPP:
Would you support or oppose a proposal to legalize medical marijuana in Massachusetts?
Support ………………………………………………….. 53%
Oppose ………………………………………………….. 35%
Not sure ………………………………………………….. 11%
Earlier this year an indirect initiative was certified by the Massachusetts’ Secretary of State. In accordance with state law this sent the initiative to the state legislature. If the Massachusetts General Assembly doesn’t approve this initiative or a similar bill by May 1st, the Massachusetts Patient Advocacy Alliance has the option to collect another roughly 11,000 valid signatures to put the issue before the public in the general election. The Alliance has already announced their intent to put the measure on the ballot if necessary.
If the legislature doesn’t soon approve medical marijuana, it looks like the voters of the state will this November. One hopes the state legislature doesn’t waste everyone’s time and needlessly delay helping people who are suffering by failing to approve this popular measure, forcing supporters to go to the ballot.
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Wait until Obama threatens to drop a drone on us here in MA. Or else put a fence around the Commonwealth and declare it a Narco-state.
BTW: Show of hands: who else is convinced that Obama’s betrayal of medical marijuana was due to the deals he cut with Pharma during the HCR fiasco. How’d that work out for ya, Team Obama?
If this passes, do you think the Feds will just raid all the dispensaries (for violating federal laws) as they have in other states, like Colorado?
The feds have at this point only raided a fraction of the overall dispensaries in other states.
Do they draw any distinction between the ones they raid and the ones they don’t? Or are they just making examples of some, to discourage others?
Because I can’t imagine many would want to risk creating a dispensary in a state where it is legal at state level, wondering if the Feds could come in at any time and haul them off to prison. Huge risk.
Considering how Obama the President has taken the polar opposite approach of Obama the Candidate on just abut every position, it appears that Collusion and Capitulation is the Obama Doctrine. When in doubt, surrender to the elites and back them with a heavy hand when needed or back room sell out and fock the Muppets in his base.
No better issue to punch the hippies with than our struggle to free the weed
That is the point of the apparent randomness in his crackdown in mostly western states: Collie-fornya, Washington, Montana and Collie-rado. since Obama doesn’t have the stomach to shut them all down with his jack booted thugs in the DEA, Pick a few at random, bring the full weight of the police state down on a few and expect fear of the same comeuppance will cause states to pause on decrim or medical mj laws. Plus Emperor Obama’s hairy eyeball in doing his seizure of cash and stash is a potent economic dis incentive to potential investors
I agree. He’s banking on the idea that ‘hippies’ have nowhere to go. Pretty sad that people who could benefit medically from it will have to pay the price for his political calculations.
I suspect you are exactly right.
Exactly.
With limited resources, the feds must rely on the power of intimidation to achieve their anti-legalization of marijuana/anti-medical marijuana agenda.
Quite pathetic that former toker Obama is aggressively pushing this shit. Perfect illustration of his corruption. He has joined forces with the worst people in this country.
If you wouldn’t sit on a jury and vote to imprison a medical marijuana patient, then you have no business voting for Barack Obama. Because it is the exact same thing.
The Feds are not just “raiding a fraction of the overall dispensaries.” Their plan is to make all of them illegal.
Here is what the medical marijuana proponents are up against in California –
One) the landlord could find themselves losing their building or strip mall to the Federal Government and being put out of business by renting to anyone using a building for the purpose of medical marijuana clinics
Two) the clinics are told that they cannot declare legitimate business expenses as part of their deductions for Federal income tax purposes. Instead, they can declare only the cost of buying the marijuana. They don’t have the right, the Federal Government is telling them via the IRS, to declare their phone bill, heating and other utility costs, their equipment costs, their delivery useage of gasoline as deductions.(Some dispensaries use vans and cars to deliver to very sick patients.) This in addition to stiff local taxes. So the Federal government, via the DOJ and IRS,plans on putting these businesses with very little ability to make a profit.
Already we have lost 2,500 jobs in the state of California to the actions of the DOJ and the IRS. These blows impact not only the clinics themselves, and the people relying on them, but also many other local businesses, and the entire state. For instance, the clinics were spending a good deal of money in local little gazettes and mom and pop newspapers. Very few people have in my rural county has disposable income, so these newspapers might not recover.
The medical marijuana clinics provided some $ 125 millions to the state and local governments. Both Humboldt and Mendocino Counties have been able to ensure the employment of police and fire fighters through these taxes.
Oh and then there is the hypocrisy. Newspapers that are part of the bigger chains tell medical marijuana users not to worry – that legal mechanisms are afoot to allow MM users to have their prescriptions filled using marijuana grown in The United Kingdom! I gotta wonder which Big Pharmaceutical gave up some Big Bucks in terms of Campaign Contributions to the Obama folks!
Very well stated. Thank you.
People have no idea at all of the huge numbers of people who were imprisoned even in supposedly liberal California, for the crime of helping their multiple sclerosis symptoms with medical marijuana before ti became legal to do so. Major drug king pins could simply snitch on people they knew to get sentences reduced, while granmas in wheelchairs had to do the full five to seven years.
I will never forgive the guy in the WH,who ran his 2008 campaign parrotting things that Kucinich and Edwards had said, for betraying us on this issue.
Thank you.
Your comment @10 is pretty strong too.
Injustice cannot last forever.
Kinda like gravity, karma is ignored only by the ignorant.
So says High John de Conkeroo.
At this very moment, a company called GW Pharmaceuticals is on the verge of having the FDA approve its’ whole-cannabis sublingual spray Sativex.
Interesting, isn’t it, that the Gub’mint has a patent on cannabis-based medicines when it has claimed all along that cannabis has no medicinal value. Even more interesting: a board member of GWP is former Office of Drug Control Policy deputy Director Dr. Andrea Barthwell? Who spent a lot of our money running around the country telling us that ALL medical cannabis was a ‘cruel hoax’? But now that she stands to make big bucks with GWP, it’s now only ‘smoked cannabis’ that has no medicinal value. Children, can you say ‘hypocrite‘? Suuuure you can!
And all of a sudden, after Prop19 got shot down (in no small part thanks to the traitorous actions of some dispensary owners and cannabis growers) when it has been admitted by the former heads of the ONDCP and UNODC the that drug money kept the ‘too big to fail’ banks from going under before we bailed them out, and Obama’s biggest supporters are banksters, we now have this Federal-taxpayer funded crackdown on the competition that dispensaries would provide Sativex.
How many rats do people have to smell before they realize there’s any at all?