This is to all supporters of the Michael Phillips Compassionate Care Act, a bill, which if enacted, would protect physicians who recommend and patients who use marijuana as medicine from arrest and prosecution under state law.
This bill is in it's 8th year in the Alabama House. Last session it finally passed the House Judiciary Committee but got no further due to it being late in the session. Then, of course, there was the election ion November, which brought sweeping changes to the Alabama House and Senate and entirely changed the make up of the House Judiciary Committee. With that committee now being made up of a majority of Republicans I will admit that we were worried about our bill. However, after talking to many of the newly elected Republicans we have found a great deal of support for this bill among them.
Now, to the new problem we have...Rep. Paul DeMarco. Rep. DeMarco has said publicly on the Matt Murphy Show that he would give our bill a fair hearing and place it in the judiciary calendar when Rep. Todd asked for him to. He has also said as much to a few of our members who have spent time in Montgomery every week since the session started. DeMarco is chair of the House Judiciary Committee.
Now, however, he is waffling.
Paul DeMarco told Rep. Todd on Friday that he doesn't want to put our medical marijuana bill on the calendar because he has all the sentencing reform bills. He wants her to take it to health instead. She doesn't want to do that and we don't want her to do that for two reasons...1) Rep. Todd says the health committee is worse than judiciary and our bill would never pass that committee and 2) We have worked only the members of the judiciary committee this session and don't want to change horses in mid-stream.
So, I need all of you out there who support this bill to melt Paul DeMarco's phone lines and flood his inbox starting today.
Here is his contact information.
Montgomery State House - (334) 242-7667
Home Phone:(205) 802-7285
Work Phone:(205) 314-7909
Email: paul@pljpc.com or paul.demarco@alhouse.org
Tell him that you want this bill placed on the Judiciary calendar. Remind him of his words on the Matt Murphy show a few weeks ago and of his words to members of Alabama Compassionate Care who have taken the time to visit him face to face this session. If you are a patient then tell him so. Please be polite. Piss and vinegar will get us nowhere.
Ok get busy! And don't let up until he relents and does what he said he would do.
PS. I just learned from Matt Murphy that Rep. DeMarco will be on his show this morning at about 8:10 a.m. Please use this opportunity to politely harass him and make him stick to his word. Call in # for Matt Murphy is 205-741-1005 or 867-569-1005.
3 comments:
It seems like every year this bill gets screwed with some kind of legislative maneuvering. A couple of years ago I think it was the wrong wording of the bill was filed. Last year the hearing was so late in the session that the bill could not proceed so they threw Rep. Todd a bone and passed it out of committee. Now this year we have some political pitty-pat ( I got that from the Constitutional Law expert no longer in the legislature) and DeMarco wants Todd to take it to another committee.
Same old BS.
I guess you'll want to place a facebook button to your blog. I just marked down the article, but I had to complete it by hand. Just my advice.
At the bottom of every post there is a button for facebook and twitter along with a couple others. Click it and you can share any post on this blog with your friends on facebook.
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