California’s citizens and legislators may be at the vanguard of America’s progressive cannabis policy-making, but, unfortunately, many in the law enforcement community in the Golden State are still uncomfortable with–and resistive of–the will of the voters (their employers) when it comes to physician-sanctioned, patient access to medicinal cannabis.
Earlier this week I criticized Hawaii Republican Governor Linda Lingle for her refusal to approve legislation that merely sought to study “issues relating to medical cannabis patients and current medical cannabis laws.”
Meet Hawaii’s Republican Governor Linda Lingle. On Monday, Gov. Lingle vetoed Senate Bill 1058, which called on the legislature to merely study “issues relating to medical cannabis patients and current medical cannabis laws.”
I’m sorry to read of this near conclusion of your run-in with cannabis prohibition laws in SD. Like you, I’d hope to see a suspended sentence, or a lower sentence all together.
With 98% of all criminal cases being plea bargained, I’m sure this Hobson’s Choice was a difficult one to make.
NORML has received a surge of complaints within the last six months. Many medical marijuana users report that they can’t find a clinic willing to take them on. Others, like Kristin, have been abandoned by clinics that suddenly adopted aggressive drug-screening policies.
The reason why the editor of Foreign Policy magazine Moises Naim’s recent column is significant is because for far too long the foreign policy community has been a willing conduit for exporting America’s wrongheaded and failed cannabis prohibition around the globe.
While California is clearly at the vanguard of implementing major legal and policy changes in seeming conflict with the federal government’s 72-year old cannabis prohibition laws, in fact little ol’ Rhode Island is on the precipice of effectively breaking the federal government’s ban on the cultivation and sale of cannabis by joining New Mexico as the only states favoring medical cannabis laws to have state-sanctioned medical cannabis cultivators and retail outlets for qualifying medical patients.
