Mainstream Media is Finally Catching On Regarding Law Enforcement Excesses and Human Tragedies Associated With Cannabis Prohibition

I spoke extensively last week with Willamette Weekly’s James Pipkin and on Monday with ABC’s Marcus Baram about NORML’s monitoring and gathering case examples from around the country where medical patients, notably medical marijuana patients, are being denied organ transplants. Marcus’ and James’ articles continue to cast more needed antiseptic light on this disturbing public health practice of official discrimination against otherwise lawful medical cannabis patients.

Heads up: Additionally, the Willamette Weekly has exposed the tragedy that confronts medical patients in Oregon — that no hospital in the state will perform organ transplants on patients who test positive for cannabis, even if they are in compliance with the state’s medical marijuana laws and are in the state’s medical marijuana patient registry.

Like the recent tragedy in Tallahassee regarding the tragic death of 23-year old Rachael Hoffman resulting from her being recruited as a ’snitch’ for the local narcotic officers, the general public and maybe more importantly the general news beat media (AKA, mainstream media) have started to really bore down hard on the human tragedies that arise daily from cannabis prohibition–both in criminal enforcement of the laws, as well as how the prohibition trends upwards into important public institutions, such as in the delivery of medicine to sick, dying or sense-threatened medical patients.

Via our voices, collective consciousness and continued effective uses of employing empowering communication mediums like the Internet (i.e., webpages, podcasts, blogs, online videos and active online social networking), we can advance the long held goal and belief that an informed general public is the best path forward to ending cannabis prohibition may now finally be upon us.

I was heartened to see the Ventura Star editorialize against denying medical marijuana patients access to organ donor banks.

As the saying goes: We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!

Let’s keep the collective pressure on the media, opinion and policy-makers to replace prohibition laws with viable, and common sense-based public policy alternatives.

Thanks to CA NORML’s Dale Gieringer, Ph.D and NLC member/2008 Aspen Legal Seminar faculty Doug Hiatt, Esq. for getting into the ABC news article!

Full Story