Last week Alabamians for Compassionate Care started a letter writing campaign to newspapers across Alabama informing voters about HB434, The Michael Phillips Compassionate Care Act. So far two letters have been published. One has been published twice.
Author: Don Seibold
State Should Allow Medical Marijuana (Birmingham News)
Medical Marijuana Bill Should Pass (Montgomery Advertiser)
Please Support Medical Marijuana Bill (Tuscaloosa News)
Author: Gil Joiner
Medical Marijuana (Anniston Star)
Many other letters have been written by the patients and family members who make up the membership of ACC. Mrs. Margaret Ann Newman, who was Miss Wheel Chair Alabama in 1996, carried the Olympic torch through Birmingham that year, is a wife, mother, grandmother, multiple sclerosis patient and medical marijuana user wrote a very moving letter, as did Christie Reeder, who is a chronic pain patient who survived a horrific auto accident 22 years ago. Another letter writer is the son of a woman who was recently diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He had a gun put to his head recently while trying to acquire medical marijuana for his mother. We are hoping that many of the letters that have been written but not yet published will appear in papers across Alabama in tomorrows Sunday editions.
If others have written letters that have been published please send them to me so that I can post them here.
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The government War on Drugs has left thousands dead, many lives otherwise destroyed, and wasted billions of taxpayers' dollars. And yet drug use continues, perhaps at a higher volume, if not usage rate, than ever.
Alcohol Prohibition was quickly recognized as the failure it was and repealed. Drug Prohibition is a similar failure, yet is such an emotional issue - usually because it is tied to children, teenagers and young adults - most politicians will not dare take a rational and humane stand on the issue.
The simple truth is that if most drugs that are now illegal were made legal for adults - control, if you wish, through pharmacies, etc - and drug abuse treated as a medical, not criminal problem, several good things would happen almost immediately.
1. Criminal cartels would no longer be interested in selling drugs, since they could be had legally and at a fraction of the illegal cost, by any adult. They would also no longer be interested in getting youngsters addicted because there would be little, if any, profit to be made.
2. Billions of tax dollars would be saved and law enforcement officers currently engaged in hunting down drug traffickers would be freed up to do other work.
3. The thousands of deaths from police-drug trafficker violence, many of them innocents who get in the way of firefights, would stop.
4. Addicts would be more likely to come forward for treatment, since having and using drugs would no longer be illegal.
5. Our overwhelmed penal system would be purged of prisoners whose only crime was using or having illegal drugs. This would save billions of tax dollars more.
There would continue to be problems, of course. Individuals with addictive personalities would continue to get addicted, and there would continue to be "recreational" abuse by young people. But the difference is that these would be treated as medical, not criminal, issues, in a humane manner.
Attempting to solve a social problem with reckless use of hard power is something akin to real warfare, and has no place in a civil society in which mutual respect and individual dignity is the focus.
A new paradigm of "soft power" with regard to drug abuse must be adopted soon, and the heinous War on Drugs ended.
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