It's all baby steps here for people living in Arizona with a medical marijuana ballot initiative being announced yesterday. I'm a member of NORML and it's exciting to be on the ground floor for a ballot initiative that will at least allow people with severe illnesses to obtain marijuana legally from a dispensary.
The newspaper in Tucson had a front page article about the ballot initiative Medical Marijuana Ballot Initiative.
The article doesn't give give a thorough overview of the 29 page ballot initiative but it does give the basic facts. Now the hard part, over 153,000 valid signatures have to be gathered by July 2010 to have this as a ballot initiative for the November 2010 election. The Marijuana Policy Project is well-funded and the mover and shaker on getting this initiative moving forward. There's a website set-up for the Arizona initiative for anyone interested in reading the full language of the initiative.
Arizona Medical Marijuana Policy Project
Arizona has passed two other times ballot initiatives for medical marijuana but it was never implemented because of problems with the wording and no doctors would prescribe marijuana. Now you just need a doctor's recommendation and if you have a serious medical condition you will be able to go to a non-profit dispensary and pick up your medicine.
This ballot initiative is a nice first step for Arizona but more importantly the state needs to move towards decriminalization of marijuana since the drugs and violence from Mexico spill over every day into our state.
So anyone living in Arizona that wants to help gather signatures go to the Arizona Medical Marijuana Policy Project's website and find out what you can do to help.