A marijuana legalization proposal by New Approach Washington has activists taking sides in the Evergreen State. While Initiative 502 would tax and regulate cannabis, co-sponsor Rick Steves admits it's a "sober, pragmatic and conservative law." MORE...H/t to Lee.
Doug Hiatt announcing that Sensible Washington will be running an initiative in 2012 and asking for donations to help cover costs of printing, and volunteer support materials.
A new marijuana-legalization campaign with deep pockets and prominent supporters is poised to force the state Legislature to vote on the issue or send it to the 2012 ballot. MORE...
With only two months left to collect enough signatures to make next November's ballot, Initiative 502, the effort to legalize marijuana by the group New Approach Washington, is getting a big shot of money in the arm.
Meanwhile, attorney Doug Hiatt, the leader of failed rival legalization group Sensible Washington, is vowing to renew their fight against 502. Hiatt says that this week he will announce a new, broader pot-legalization initiative to be filed in January and ready to compete in the November election as well. MORE...
KUOW, audio (20:00):City Attorney Pete Holmes is joining an initiative campaign to fully legalize marijuana. He says prohibiting pot makes our government complicit in the tens of thousands of murders committed by Mexican drug cartels. We talk to Pete Holmes about his views on pot legalization, plus the language of the tunnel referendum and releasing the names of misbehaving police officers.Guest(s):
Pete Holmes is the Seattle City Attorney.
Douglas Hiatt is a criminal defense attorney and the chairman of Sensible Washington
Sensible Washington:Last week, Governor Gregoire dealt a huge blow to tens of thousands of Washington’s most vulnerable citizens. By partially vetoing the proposed medical marijuana bill, the governor shut down a slowly emerging industry that was providing safe access to medicine for cancer and AIDS patients, multiple sclerosis sufferers, and those dealing with severe pain. As a result, criminal gangs are now poised to reclaim the market, bringing more violence to our streets, greater dangers to our children, and making it unnecessarily difficult for the sick and terminally ill to get the medicine that their doctors authorize. The governor’s stated reason for leaving us in this mess was that she feared the federal government’s response. MORE...
Photo: Choking Mona LisaWHAT: 8pm, $5, 21+. All proceeds go to Sensible Washington. Featuring Choking Mona Lisa, D.A.27, Jeremy Serwer, and acoustic perfomance by Tork. See you there!Howie P.S.: Now that our governor has stymied the will of the Washington state legislature, we know I-1149 is only way FORWARD!
WHERE:
The Tiger Lounge
412 South Orcas Street
Seattle (Georgetown)
Sensible Washington:We’d like to thank NORML Show Live for giving Washington State airtime at the National Conference in Denver this afternoon. Sensible Washington is making an audacious bid to qualify an initiative for the ballot and, if possible, without using paid signature gatherers. Collecting signatures from 8% of the voting public couldn’t possibly happen on its own. Could it?
Sensible Washington operates without directors, but everyone gets to be a producer. We kicked off a 4/20 money bomb and only raised $600. We collected upwards of 5,000 signatures that day.
So how is this happening at all? How long can a campaign hope to double its signature counts every week? What moved a donor to add over $1,000 in the Sensible Washington coffers during 4/20 week? By some state of grace there are more shirts, more signage, more tech, more petitions.
What does it mean when the director of reddit’s cannabis community wants to expose your campaign to an audience of over half a million supporters? How much money do you need for 1,000,000 exposures on Facebook? About $500. MORE...
Friday, March 181:00-5:45 PM – Rainier Beach | Rainier Beach Library (9125 Rainier Ave S). Note: By law, you must wait until 5 PM to gather signatures.
Saturday, March 19
2:00-5:45 PM – Magnolia | Magnolia Library (2801 34th Ave)
4:00-5:00 PM – Federal Way | Federal Way 320th Library (848 S 320th St)
Saturday, March 19
3:00-5:00 PM – Covington | Covington Library (27100 164th Ave SW)
Sunday, March 20
2:00-4:00 PM – Burien | Burien Library (400 SW 152nd St)
Monday, March 21
1:00-5:00 PM – Capitol Hill | Capitol Hill Library (425 Harvard Ave E)
6:00-8:00 PM – Auburn | Auburn Library (1102 Auburn Way S)
Tuesday, March 22
1:00-7:45 PM – Fremont | Fremont Library (731 N. 35th St)
6:00-7:30 PM – SeaTac | Valley View Library (17850 Military Rd S)
Wednesday March 23
11:00-5:45 PM – University District | University Branch Library (5009 Roosevelt Way NE)
Thursday March 24
11:00 AM-5:45 PM – West Seattle | West Seattle Library (2306 42nd Ave SW)
4:45-6:15 PM – Bellevue | Bellevue Library (1111 110th Ave NW)
Friday, March 25
12:30-5:45 PM Greenwood | Greenwood Library (8016 Greenwood Ave N)
sensiblewashington.org:Sensible Washington is pleased to announce a petition drive to put Initiative 1149 before the voters this November in order to end adult marijuana prohibition in Washington State. I-1149 seeks to eliminate state penalties for responsible adult use of cannabis by removing “marijuana” from the list of controlled substances.A previous filing was withdrawn after receiving an unfavorable interpretation by the Washington State Office of the Attorney General. Rather than engage in a lengthy court battle, Sensible Washington refiled two initiatives. I-1149 emerged as the clear favorite because it achieved the intended goal of leaving existing penalties for minors intact.
Here’s how it works: After removing marijuana from the list of controlled substances, I-1149 explicitly recreates the penalties for minors one by one. I-1149 then directs the Legislature to “adopt rules and if appropriate, tax provisions, to carry out the provisions of this act by final adjournment of the 2012 legislative session.”
By law, the signature gathering phase of the campaign can begin late Friday afternoon, March 18.
Ballot Title: Initiative Measure No. 1149 concerns marijuana.
This measure would remove existing state civil and criminal penalties regarding marijuana. It would create new criminal penalties regarding marijuana for persons under eighteen years and for adults who distribute marijuana to them.
Should this measure be enacted into law? Yes [ ] No [ ]
Ballot Measure Summary
This measure would remove state civil and criminal penalties for the cultivation, possession, transportation, sale, or use of marijuana. It would create new criminal penalties for manufacture, delivery, sale or possession of marijuana by persons younger than eighteen years old, and for adults who distribute marijuana to them. Persons under eighteen would be permitted to possess marijuana obtained pursuant to a valid prescription. Certain penalties relating to drug paraphernalia would not apply to marijuana-related offenses.
Undeterred by last year's failure to pass a marijuana-legalization initiative, and a plea by national pot-advocacy groups to hold off until next year for another effort, Sensible Washington is filing a new initiative this afternoon with the Secretary of State. Douglas Hiatt, chair of the organization, says a lot of things are different this year. And activists in the group didn't want to wait.Howie P.S.: I've always thought the The Weekly should be called The Weakly. Writing at the same location (referenced earlier above), Keegan Hamilton does offer this bit of strategic thinking:
Hiatt says various national activists, including Rob Kampia at the Marijuana Policy Project, asked him to wait until a new coordinated legalization effort could get off the ground in 2012. Peter Lewis, chairman of the insurance company Progressive and a funder of drug-reform causes, will then likely bankroll initiatives in several Western states, including Washington, Hiatt says he was told. The national activists also argued that legalization initiatives would have better luck in a presidential election year.
But Hiatt says that members of his group thought they were ready now. Last year, he says, the group had maybe 500 volunteers to collect signatures to qualify the initiative for the ballot. That wasn't nearly enough to get the signatures they needed, but since then, Hiatt says, "thousands" of volunteers have stepped forward.
Hiatt also says he's going out of the gate with $50,000 already raised--$10,000 more than he got during all of last year.
The initiative itself is different from last year's. "It directs the legislature to adopt rules and regulations and, if appropriate, taxes at the earliest opportunity," Hiatt says. This, he contends, will forestall objections from the pro-regulation camp. Initiative backers can even point out that a pot regulation and taxation bill has already been submitted to the legislature, Hiatt says.
As Keegan Hamilton points out, the bill appears to be something of a pipe dream. Regardless, Hiatt seems pleased with this new trick of coming out in favor of pot regulation without having to deal with any of the complicated, legal issues that entails. "I'm able to have my cake and eat it too," he says.
"Anything that moves us toward the direction of people not going to jail or being arrested is a step in the right direction," says Ben Livingston, a member of the Board of Directors of the Cannabis Defense Coalition. "Whether the bill is going to pass is another thing. It's a good conversation starter, at least. I think that's more the intent than anything else."The AP also had a story today, "New state initiative proposal to legalize marijuana" that has a slightly different perspective:
Marijuana activists are taking another shot at a ballot measure legalizing the drug for adults under state law - but they hope lawmakers beat them to it.
Sensible Washington):You read that right. Sensible Washington–thanks to our many supporters’ contributions–is paying to have I-1068 inserted into each copy of The Stranger’s 80,000 print run this Wednesday June 23rd. We’ll also have a full page ad explaining to people how they can sign the initiative, get their friends and family to sign it, and send it on into us by the end of June 28th.We’re doing this because the weather has been awful all spring (June is already at 200+ percent of normal precipitation for the month) and it’s been very difficult to intersect with the voting public in the Seattle Metro area to get their signatures on I-1068. So tell all your friends and neighbors to get a copy of this week’s Stranger and to get us a bunch of signatures and mail them in by the end of June 28th to the address on the petition.
Philip Dawdy (Sensible Washington):I wanted to give you all an update on the status of the signed I-1068 petitions which were seized by federally-funded WestNET personnel in a raid of the North End 420 Club in Tacoma two weeks ago. The 420 Club is operating as a medical marijuana dispensary.Howie P.S.: Meanwhile,Two of the seized petitions will be returned to us promptly, according to a WestNET detective I spoke with earlier this morning. They will be picked up by our Bremerton coordinator from the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office evidence room, likely before the end of today.
These two petitions have been photocopied and I have asked WestNET to destroy those photocopies. They tell me they cannot without an agreement between the prosecution and defense because, well, that’s the way these things work. We will be working to make that agreement happen, but it will take some time. My sense of things, from talking with the WestNET detective, is that no one on the law enforcement side will oppose the destruction of those photocopies.
Why were they seized as evidence in the place? The WestNET detective I spoke with said their search warrant authorized them to take any kind of list or ledger they encountered during their search. That’s their explanation. I simply wish the officers who conducted the raid would’ve used a bit more discretion when they were grabbing lists and ledgers because I-1068 petitions are clearly marked as an initiative to the people and even have formal language directed to Secretary of State Sam Reed. Not exactly evidence of criminal activity.
The remaining problem is that the 420 Club people insist that there were 10 signed petitions seized in the raid and WestNET tells me they only have two and that they have gone through their evidence boxes from the raid and there are no other copies of the petition. So we’ve got a discrepancy here that I cannot account for. Neither can WestNET or the 420 Club. My hope is that these missing eight petitions will turn up later somewhere in the chain of evidence and be returned to us before July 2, our deadline to submit signed petitions to the Secretary of State.
My fingers are officially crossed both for the missing petitions and for the 420 Club people as they begin to defend themselves against charges all because our state’s medical marijuana law is vague–even the WestNET detective agrees with me on this–and offers slim protection to people providing physician-authorized medicine to legitimate patients.
The 420 Club raid is another example of why it is imperative to get I-1068 on the ballot, so if you haven’t signed the initiative please do so. If you’d like to volunteer to help gather signatures, please fill out our volunteer form right here and we’ll be in touch promptly. We only have until the end of June to get this done, so let’s all get this done.
Philip is "battling Live Nation, the people who operate the Gorge, for access for our volunteers at the Sasquatch Festival. They are denying us access and I am so mad I cannot see straight. Only about 99.9 percent of their audience and performers approve of our cause, so why the denial is beyond me."
In the past two weeks, we have seen two traumatic incidents involving medical marijuana.On March 9 and again on March 15, the homes of two medical-marijuana patients who are also providers were the sites of violent home invasions. The victim of the first attack died from his wounds. The owner of the second home suffered injuries in a gunfight that also left one of his attackers critically wounded. These attacks highlight shortcomings in our law and the need for reform.
In 1998, the people approved Initiative 692 by a margin of 59 percent, which allowed doctors to authorize the use of medical marijuana for patients with terminal or debilitating conditions. While the law also allows patients to grow their own plants or designate a provider to grow them, it does not provide guidance on where to obtain seeds or cuttings. The law also states that a designated provider may serve "only one patient at any one time." The vagueness of the current law makes it very difficult for patients to get the medication they need and are legally entitled to.Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, D-Seattle, chairs the Senate Labor, Commerce & Consumer Protection Committee. She was prime sponsor of Senate Bill 5798, passed by the Legislature on March 11, which extends to all health-care professionals with prescriptive authority the ability to authorize the medical use of marijuana.Some are working to make medical marijuana more readily accessible to patients. Last June, the Change Dispensary opened its doors in Spokane and made no secret of the fact that it was providing medical marijuana to multiple patients. Its owners were arrested and charged with felonies.
Our law puts patients and providers in an impossible position. A patient or provider can comply with the law and still be subject to arrest, prosecution or seizure of medical marijuana. Often, a patient or provider must endure the stress, cost and embarrassment of a trial — and the patient must disclose private medical information — before being acquitted by a jury.
This failure to provide complete protection leaves everyone — patients, doctors, providers and law enforcement — confused about the rules. Because of this, patients and providers are often afraid to call on law enforcement for protection from burglars or even to report thefts or assaults.
It is time to provide qualified medical-marijuana patients complete protection under the law and to directly regulate the production and dispensing of cannabis. Patients should not have to fear arrest, home searches or property seizures by law-enforcement officers. Providers who want to help patients access medical marijuana should not have to risk prosecution and robbery.
As King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg recently told The New York Times, "By forcing this production to remain underground, you increase the risk of violence for everybody and you disburse that violence to residential neighborhoods and put everybody at risk."
More than a decade has passed since Washington's citizens clearly stated that physician-authorized medical use of marijuana should be legal. In 2011, I will introduce legislation to protect patients from arrest and prosecution and provide well-regulated, safe, consistent and secure sources of cannabis for medical use through licensed dispensaries. I hope citizens across the state will help me pass this legislation to improve the safety of patients, our loved ones and the communities in which we live.
Howie P.S: Sensible Washington emails me:If anyone can make any of these events, please do!
http://www.seattlefantasy.com/1068/EventCalendar.php
We need as many volunteers as possible out collecting signatures at
the Sounders game (starts at 7:00) on Thursday evening at Qwest Field
and in and around Pioneer Square before the game. In addition to the
sounders we'll be working other shows this weekend:
Blue scholars at Showbox at the market - both the Friday and Saturday
shows are sold out and there's now a Sunday night show for Blue
Scholars.
Mad Rad (Sat. at Crocodile Cafe) and Hell's Belles (Sat. at Neumos).
Any questions, you can contact Bonnie Fong, our Seattle
events coordinator, at bonnfong@gmail.com
