Dear Colleagues & Friends,
I am writing to you today to personally invite you to join me and Alabamians for Compassionate Care, Alabama's medical marijuana advocacy group, for a gathering on Dec. 13, 2006, at O.T.'s Sports Grill in Birmingham, AL from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. This event will combine a holiday celebration with a 'meet & greet' in a relaxed atmosphere between patients, physicians, state lawmakers, lobbyists, grassroots organizers and supporters to discuss ideas for the Compassionate Care Act in the upcoming legislative session.
The Compassionate Care Act is a bill which would authorize the medical use of marijuana only for certain qualifying patients who have been diagnosed by a physician as having a debilitating medical condition. You can read the entire bill HERE.
Work on this bill began in late 2004 and a slightly different version of the Compassionate Care Act passed the Alabama House Judiciary Committee in April of 2005. However, the distribution language in the earlier version was unworkable so the bill was reintroduced in 2006 only to stall out due to it being an election year.
In 2007 things are going to be different. We are going to make it happen. We have expanded our network of patients in Alabama who use marijuana as medicine. Meet Laura Campbell and Don Prockup . Laura worked with us in the past and has had some excellent media coverage. Don has just begun working with us and sadly the remaining days of his life are extremely few.
Think for a moment if you were in the same situation as Laura or Don. What would you do? Would you suffer near unbareable sickness and pain all because some suit in Montgomery or Washington D.C. said marijuana isn't medicine when medical science says that it is? Every human being has the sovreign right to decide what medical treatments work for them and to engage in those treatments without fear of government retailation.
Please join us in asserting that right for ourselves, should we ever need it, and for those who need it now but are too sick and weak to fight this battle for themselves.
RSVP if you plan to attend and bring some friends, relatives or co-workers with you. Please share this invitation with anyone you think will be interested and if you are an Alabama blogger please consider reposting on your site.
Happy Holidays,
Loretta Nall
Exec. Dir.
Alabamians for Compassionate Care
PO BOX 504
Alexander City, AL 35011
alabamacompcare@yahoo.com
256-625-9599
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4 comments:
Loretta, I have a question about the bill you mentioned. I know that one of the problems they had in California was that medical marijuana, while legal, wasn't regulated, so people were growing their own. Do you know if this particular bill will have some sort of clause where medical marijuana would be regulated or dispensed by a pharmacist? I'm mostly concerned about quality issues, and I definitely don't want to hear about any police officers kicking in doors of legal users.
What we are hoping to do is get Universities to grow it. Places like Auburn, Tuskegee and Alabama State. They will be licensed by the Dept. of Public Health and anything distributed by the Public Health Dept. will have to pass quality controls. This has worked very well in Colorado and our bill is modeled after theirs.
That information has not been written into the bill that you looked at because our sponsors in the legislature recommended that we re-introduce it without any changes and then work through the distribution section via committee and sub-committee.
As for pharmacists....medical marijuana will never be distributed by a licensed pharmacist or sold in drug stores until the DEA reclassifies it and the FDA approves it.
I hope that this bill is passed.
Look how far we've come :)
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