State regulators today certified a voter-initiated medical cannabis access measure for the 2018 ballot. Officials announced that proponents gathered nearly 154,000 validated initiative signatures from registered voters — far exceeding the total necessary to place the measure before a statewide vote.
The Utah Medical Cannabis Act permits qualified patients to obtain either herbal cannabis or cannabis-infused products from a limited number state-licensed dispensaries.
Both the Utah Medical Association and Republican Gov. Gary Herbert have publicly opined against the measure. Nonetheless, public support in favor of the initiative remains strong, with 77 percent of Utahns either “strongly” or “somewhat” endorsing the plan, according to a UtahPolicy.com poll.
Voters in Oklahoma will also decide on a medical access initiative in a special election on Tuesday, June 26. By a margin of nearly 2 to 1, Oklahoma voters support the passage of State Question 788, according to polling data reported last week.
Voters in two other states — Michigan and Missouri — are anticipated to decide on Election Day on statewide marijuana reform initiatives. Recent polling from those states finds majority public support for all three measures.
The activists have done the groundwork. But it will all be wasted effort unless the citizens of Utah get out and vote!
In order to vote, you must be registered in advance. You can do that here, and ROCK THE VOTE with NORML:
http://norml.org/action-center/item/register-to-vote
Check your registration status! Find your polling locations! Everything you need, right here!
https://www.vote.org
Good that the people of Utah can become more free of illness using Cannabis allowed as medicine than has been the case in the past 80 years of Cannabis prohibition.
Now a thought about water, if you’re dehydrated drink water; but not Only if you’re already dehydrated because drinking enough water beforehand should keep you from becoming dehydrated in most circumstances.
Well, same with Cannabis, isn’t it better to have it occasionally and thereby Stay healthy instead of waiting til Cancer or Glaucoma or Diabetes or many other conditions which Cannabis prevents can be diagnosed?
Ancient James,
I think you’re onto something there. We need to promote using Wellness as our significant health reference, instead of Sickness.
Wellness is more than the absence of any definable, and identifiable sicknesses. But we only look at the illnesses. This is a cultural problem, but it is undergirded by a Corporate mentality that measures everything in terms of potential profit.
This is ultimately why the Republican Corporate lackeys, and their rich doner base, are so desperate to undo Obamacare — it’s fucking up their insurance rip-offs and whatnot.
Wellness doesn’t pay; not from a Corporate perspective. Capitalism doesn’t care if there is lead in the drinking water (your water, not theirs — Corporations get the good stuff.) But Coca-cola will be delighted to sell you some bottled water — at a profit, of course. Then, if you still have any money left, they have all kinds of “treatments” for THE SYMPTOMS of lead poisoning for you — at your local pharmacy, now!
Wellness over Sickness, People over Profits!
This corporate malfeasance is not hypothetical.
Republican Governor Rick Snyder poisoned his own constituents in Flint, MI, by switching to lead-contaminated river water, from what they already had: clean lake water. But the car manufacturers started complaining… they said that the tainted water was corroding their car parts during the manufacture process.
So, the corporations got THEIR water switched BACK to the clean, lakewater source! No shit, that happened. The citizens, the actual people, are still forced to use lead-contaminated river water.
Goddamn stupid Republicans.
That’s just wrong. That’s beyond criminal — that’s just evil.
Those are surprisingly good numbers for culturally conservative states. If the measures pass there it opens the door for more of the same in other similar states. A “mixed state” like Florida needed a supermajority to get medpot and got it. How long before they get recpot too? Right now it looks like within 10 years at most should a few more “easy pickings” go with recpot and the conservative states are willing to vote in medpot.
While the Mormons hash out whether Jesus smoked weed on Mars… (too much, I know), it looks like our signatures to the FDA are cracking the UN’s World Health Organization’s prohibitionary stance;
https://www.marijuanamoment.net/united-nations-panel-releases-first-ever-review-of-marijuana/
The WHO actually admitted no one has ever overdosed on marijuana.
The WHO said some ridiculous $#!+ about mj as well, like marijuana consumption could cause cognitive impairment and cause people to make poor decisions that could “increase the likelihood of getting STD’s.”
Are they kidding? We have a President who can’t tell what HIV or HPV are and yet somehow marijuana is to blame? Propecia and Finasteride can cause cognitive impairment and poor life decisions that lead to mail order brides, hush money for porn stars and STD’s. That’s IF psychosis doesn’t set in from genital shrinkage.
But marijuana increase STD’s? If anything marijuana improves cognitive function and enhances sexual pleasure and intimacy. We can do both, you know. I never got high and woke up chewing my arm off from the woman next to me.
I’m glad that UN Secratary General Gutteres is preparing the research to deschedule marijuana, but he needs to tell the WHO how STD’s have vastly diminished in Portugal since decriminalization.
Next the WHO will have us believe Jesus smokes weed on Mars and caught an STD from Mary Magdalene.
Every fucking thing Trump does is evil.
Hard to argue with that, Dain. But sometimes pure greed ends up like the story of the dog with two steaks in his mouth who barks at his own reflection in the river and ends up with none.
Clearly Big Pharma is pushing for international regulations to get to schedule 2 so they can peddle as much mislabeled marinol and synthetic mj patents before the flood gates open wide for legalization.
But the weight behind those gates keeps growing, making monopolies unsustainable.
And the best part about marijuana is that whole plant strains are SO good, and synthetic mj sucks so BAD (and the stuff on the street is lethal) that consumer demand shapes the market legality.
Don’t forget in your capitalist equations that we always underestimate our power in a capitalist economy as consumers.
Julian,
It is true I don’t think much of Capitalism, or it’s adherents.
You write: “Don’t forget in your capitalist equations that we always underestimate our power in a capitalist economy as consumers.”
I had to ponder that one, given the way you phrased it. Because, over the years, I have come around to the view that “consumer choice” is mostly an illusion… a corporate lie.
I believe the phrase “consumer choice” is like a magician’s patter, “Pick a card, any card,” the purpose of which is to create the illusion of free choice, when in fact, the magician’s volunteer from the audience is accepting a forced pick all along.
“Coke or Pepsi?” makes you feel like you were given a choice, even though you only had one choice: sugar-water. Saying “Mountain Dew or Dr. Pepper” won’t help. Too bad if you “choose” not to get diabetes. That takes rejecting the false choice altogether, and just drinking water.
But it was marijuana itself, and its prohibition, that taught me: “The Man” is making my choices for me, and he is making poor choices for me. He is making choices that are in his best interest, not mine.
I would agree that we underestimate our power as consumers, if, by that, this is what you mean: we have the power as citizens to reject the false choices and forced picks with which we are presented.
But, of course, doing so is illegal.
Even clean water is not an option. Just ask the residents of Flint, MI!
So, it might not be as easy as it sounds to vote with your dollars, when your only meaningful choice is to not spend any money at all on any of the worthless crap corporate America churns out.
Maybe we are all a little bit addicted to making easy choices instead of hard ones.
I should point out that contaminated and polluted drinking water is a growing and under-addressed problem in America. Again, this is primarily a result of corporate malfeasance.
Here are two examples of Corporate America reacting (badly) to an Awake Citizenry: 1) McDonalds has abandoned all pretense of claiming that a person can make a living working there — now it says they are only there as your “first job” as in, kinda like, you know, an enterprising ten-year-old with a newspaper route! 2) “Business” is now putting out creepy, Big Brother political ads saying that only “Business” can solve America’s problems. The threat is veiled, but it is there. Eventually, the velvet glove gives way to the clenched fist.
Dain,
Mislabeling, fraudulent or missing ingredient labels and corporate hush money from big agribusiness is an enormous crisis in our society, and McDonalds and Coca-Cola are just part of that establishment.
The most revolutionary thing we are doing with legalized marijuana is bringing back a whole plant herbal market for Food and Drugs so we can see and smell what we are consuming before purchasing it. The idea of processing food or powdering “medicine” into unidentifiable pills and then placing whole plants that nourish and heal us on a scheduled list of prohibition is taking our right to fresh food and medicine away from us, and patenting the very life that sustains us.
The most incredible thing about marijuana is despite our intense effort to synthesize it, patent it or label it, there is nothing better than the fresh terpene natural scent of whole plant, open source marijuana. In this way, marijuana has found the chemical keys to save us from corporate avarice and the infection of predatory, unchecked capitalist economies. More than ever before we can choose to buy whole plant marijuana instead of synthetic marinol. And for the most part, we do.
As a side note, Dain,
It took me years of investment and work to build a rainwater collection system. There’s a company out of Moscow, Missouri (not Russia) that makes affordable rainwater filtration with UV, carbon and sediment filters. I buit a metal building and funneled the gutters right into the tank inside the building to protect the plumbing and reduce the water loss of running pipes underground which always leak. As one rainwater collector put it “You can get your water from heaven or hell; take your pick.”
But for most Americans like those in Flint they cannot afford rainwater much less purchase a politician to get safe access to drinking water.
Legalizing hemp is a seguey to conserving groundwater, because hemp has not been genetically engineered to resist patented pesticides and herbicides which cause Genetically Engineered Crops to use more water.
Ultimately, we are going to have to invest in local community rainwater harvesting for gardens first (less regs) then drinking water and invest in community hemp fields to mitigate accessible, affordable fresh water and soil loss by Big Agribusiness.
The legalization of cannabis at the federal level would help reduce the overcrowding in federal prisons, and the money that would come in could be redirected to help out schools. For example, Colorado has delegated over $2,000,000.00 to schools in the 2015-2016 and also in the 2016-2017 year (Silbaugh, 2016). States spend $3,613,969,972.00 annually just in enforcing marijuana laws. “In 2010, the cops made one marijuana bust every 37 seconds” (ACLU, 2018). Now, that’s not big drug lords. Those are general possession charges, where they are being locked up just for having a cannabis on their person. There is a law that is being proposed called the Marijuana Justice Act. This act would allow for a $500 million-dollar fund for job training in the cannabis industry, and would also expunge the records of inmates who were arrested for possession of the drug (Berke, 2018). The average cost of housing an inmate in 2015, was $31,977.65 (Bureau of Prisons, 2016). Legalizing marijuana won’t fix all of the problems, but it could help alleviate a few of the big ones. This would be a good first step in helping clear out federal prisons and save money, and also with helping better fund schools for our children’s education.
References:
ACLU, (2018) Marijuana Arrests by the Numbers Retrieved from https://www.aclu.org/gallery/marijuana-arrests-numbers
Berke, Jeremy (April 20, 2018). Top Democrats Have Introduced a Number of Bills to Push for the Federal Legalization of Marijuana. Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com/marijuana-justice-act-marijuana-legalization-bill-introduced-in-house-2018-1
Bureau of Prisons (July 19, 2016) Annual Determination of Average Cost of Incarceration. Retrieved from https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/07/19/2016-17040/annual-determination-of-average-cost-of-incarceration
Silbaugh, Larson (2016). Distribution of Marijuana Tax Revenue. Colorado Legislative Council Staff, 16-04, 2.
Great citations Kahlan. I’ll copy this into my next letter to my state reps.
Has anyone considered creating a ‘Black Market Card System’?
Imagine if a state offered people the ability to continue ‘business as usual’ for a fee of 200 per quarter or 800 per year?
Literally pay to be left alone, as the card would protect you from local, state or federal influence.
Imagine paying ‘taxes’ of 800 and being allowed to do anything above that.
Imagine if someone worded this on a ballot initiative, please do that, or at least share this idea.
Interesting Alex. Mississippi officially outlawed alcohol in the past up until 1966. Before that, alcohol would be sold, but the purchaser would have to pay an “illegal” liquor tax. This has been done before, it could be done again to apply to cannabis in those states that are slow to reform.