Medical Marijuana Vote Comes Down to the Wire
Monday, October 26, 2009 at 04:26PM With several legislators still appearing to be undecided, the fight to pass a medical marijuana law in New Hampshire is coming right down to the wire. Now that the Obama administration has clarified its medical marijuana policy, and now that the U.S. attorney for New Hampshire has announced that his office will not prosecute patients under federal law, it's clear that a simple vote by the New Hampshire legislature is all that's necessary to protect seriously ill patients from arrest if their doctors recommend medical marijuana.
The House and Senate will cast their final votes this Wednesday, and it will only be necessary to gain two votes in the Senate to receive the 2/3 majorities that would be necessary for a veto override. (The House vote was 232-108, or 68%, and the Senate vote was 14-10).
If you'd like to see this bill finally pass, please click here to send a quick message to your legislators and visit NHCompassion.org to learn more.
Reader Comments (10)
You and the rational people for med-mj did everything you could do--and did it right.
The public intoxication you-tube crowd undermined the efforts of a lot of people. We'll never know if that made the difference, but in a close vote like this ( the House DID override) anyone who took part in those demonstrations should take responsibility for their short sighted"feel good" tactics.
Of course now they'll blame goverment. They'll blame a lone Senator--Betsy Devries rather than take the responsibility I'm speaking of.
Same goes for bloggers who supported their efforts and web sights that played into the hands of the anarchists amongst us.
Pointing fingers at people and blaming them for the loss does NOTHING to improve future support and does everything to turn people off from working with you in the future. I suggest you stop playing the poor loser and attempting to push blame on anyone and everyone you disagree with.
True to form you won't take any responsibility for your actions.
I'll continue to work with people who understand the legislative process and who understand how to present issues to the public.
Since Matt is someone I respect and someone I consider a friend I stopped any and all coverage about the 420 events until after the 28th. I even spoke to some supporters of the 420 events asking them politely to hold back until we tried things Matt's way. We tried it and failed so now it's time for a stronger approach and I for one feel that since it worked for homosexuals to come out of the closet and show society that they existed everywhere that smokers too can take the same approach. Just as drag queens were viewed as turns offs, I'm sure too you'll find smokers who are turn offs too but when people see productive members of society supporting legalization their views will slowly change.
Finally you have admitted that you are more motivated by spite than rationality.
I've been after that admission for two years.
I'm marking my calendar.
At the same time, Richard is a Republican family man in a conservative town, and he supports marijuana legalization, so I'm not going to throw him to the wolves! I guess he's allowed to be wrong about what constitutes good strategy, and I don't ever expect to see him smoking pot on the side of the road, so there are no hard feelings on my end.
And Matt and Chaz both, I was reading more about the votes in the house and senate. Evidence is showing that the 420 events helped.
Rep DiFruscia during his house testimony used the 420 protests are reason to support the bill pointing out that the laws already in place are unenforceable pointing to the absence of arrests at the rallies as an example.
Look at the homosexual movement. When homosexuals began coming out of the closet people looked down at them at first. The people against them pointed to the extreme drag queens as examples of the moral decay on society, just as Chaz continue to point to younger smokers. It wasn't until they started seeing business leaders, friends, neighbors, and other respected people come out saying they too were homosexual that the movement really started to gain ground.
As long as pot smokers are viewed as losers living in trailers who can't hold "real" jobs and can be pointed at as examples of people with past hard drug problems in their history, those against the legalization will always have the upper hand. When they see professionals and business leaders and others they respect coming out saying yes it should be legal (even if those people do not smoke) others will wake up that it isn't just the "losers" pushing for legalization.
One additional point to Matt, being a "Republican family man in a conservative town" should be irrelevant. Legalization is not a party line issue and if Democrats say things like that they'll make it into one. Lynch is the key reason this bill wasn't passed in the first place and he was a Democrat. That's the biggest problem I'm having with Chaz right now...he's trying to make it into a partisan issue and if you do that you instantly turn one side against it.
Of course, but _HOW_ did they come out of the closet? By making out on the side of the street, or by simply telling the truth about their private lives?!?! The former method would have offended people, whereas the latter method was very effective.
I appreciate Rep. DeFruscia's support, and he did try to spin the 420 events in favor of the bill, but his comments didn't really make a lot of sense considering that the bill only applies to seriously ill patients. I know that some medical users have been misled into participating in these events, but that is not what people see when they are driving by -- fair or not, the average person sees a bunch of potheads with nothing better to do that get high in the park every afternoon, and it's the opposite of helpful.
Senator Letorneau also brought up the 420 events in his floor speech. He said people had been publicly smoking in his town of Derry, and "they don't look very sick to me." He concluded that the whole medical marijuana effort is a sham to legalize pot for everybody, which is the opposite of true, but in politics, perception is more important than reality!
If you really believe the 420 stuff helped galvanize support for HB 648, I'll send a traveling ice salesman to your door sometime in January and expect him to make a big sale! The reality is that it made our task far more difficult and may have been the reason we didn't succeed. I don't know if we could have won without the 420 protests, but it's completely off-base to suggest that they helped. If you don't believe me, ask a few senators whether they think it helped or hurt... like it or not, those are the 24 people who actually vote on legislation.
OK--as for the parallel between this and the homosexual rights movement, it goes like this:
"Act out" was the the part of the homosexual rights movement that you keep referring to. But as the possibility of meaningful legislation moved forward there was a tremendous amount of friction between that group and people actually working on legislation and public opinion.
Eventually "act out" realized it had served it's purpose and relented.
For the record
I'm not at all happy with Governor Lynch on this one. I left a message at the governors office before he vetoed the bill and will leave another to note my displeasure with the outcome.