Manic, Chill

Obama Leads Romney by 13 in Colorado - Public Policy Polling

I have to say, I’m glad to see Colorado pulling back away from the GOP again, but I really wish the gap here was larger. Either way, it’s nice living in a blue state.

Coloradans Will Vote On Marijuana Legalization This November

The Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol held a press conference Monday morning, to announce that Secretary of State Scott Gessler’s office had certified Amendment 64 for the ballot.

Many advocates were concerned that Amendment 64 wouldn’t make it onto ballots, when Secretary of State Scott Gessler’s office announced that the Campaign had not raised enough signatures earlier this month. Although they had raised nearly double the required signatures, the secretary’s office certified 2500 fewer signatures than were needed, leading many to believe that the fight was lost.

Fortunately, Colorado law required that the group be given an additional two weeks to find more support, during which time they pulled in an additional twelve thousand signatures. The announcement was made during a protest outside of President Obama’s Lakewood, CO campaign office, and featured a speech from Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson. It would also appear that, somewhere in those 12,000 signatures, were the 2500 or so needed to place Amendment 64 on ballots this November.

During yesterday’s press conference, former Colorado House Majority Leader Paul Weissmann took some time to share his thoughts on the proposed Amendment, and why he chooses to support it.

“As someone who was once referred to as ‘the Capitol’s best-known bartender,’ it is especially appropriate for me to be endorsing the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol. Americans learned long ago that prohibiting a popular, widely used substance is a policy disaster. Alcohol prohibition ended nearly 80 years ago for many good reasons. There are just as many good reasons to end marijuana prohibition and I am proud to be a part of the effort to do that here in Colorado,” he said.

Advocates across the state are certain that the measure will pass. They point to an increased number of sponsors on Rep. Jared Polis‘(D-CO) bill to remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act, and the fact that another legalization measure might also end up on the ballot alongside Amendment 64.

An advocacy group called Legalize 2012 is currently collecting signatures for an alternate legalization bill, still targeting the November 2012 ballot, but that does not include any limitations on the amount of marijuana possessed by an adult.

“Voters in Colorado are ready to end marijuana prohibition and begin regulating and taxing it like alcohol,” said proponent Betty Aldworth. “By regulating and taxing marijuana like alcohol Colorado can tightly control its production and sale, generate tens of millions of dollars in new tax revenue, and redirect our limited law enforcement resources toward serious crimes.”

Steve Fox, director of government relations for the Marijuana Policy Project, told The Colorado Independent that he thinks the measure will pass.

“We’ve seen over the last decade or so that marijuana bills do much better in presidential elections than in other years,” he said. Fox said presidential elections typically bring younger voters to the polls.

(image courtesy of Toke of the Town)

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(Source: coloradoindependent.com)

Colorado Republicans Join GOP’s National Voter ID Battle

State Representatives Libby Szabo(R-Arvada) and Ken Summers(R-Lakewood) have introduced HB 1111, a so-called “Voter ID bill”, in the Colorado House of Representatives. The bill passed a party-line vote in the Republican-controlled House State Affairs committee, and looks to be headed to a vote on the floor of the House chambers. However, should the bill make it out of the House, many believe it will be killed by a party-line vote in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Republican lawmakers and witnesses who testified in support of the bill said state-issued photo IDs would be “one more tool” clerks could use in the work of securing elections against fraud. They argued that Americans use photo IDs to conduct the commonplace business of their lives, to travel, do banking, visit the doctor, buy alcohol, for example, and that voting is at least as important as those everyday activities.

Democrats pointed out that photo ID laws create obstacles to voting and only work to prevent polling-place voter impersonation, a problem that they said statistically does not exist. They cited the five-year Bush justice department effort to root out voter fraud that found only 86 instances in a period where 300 million votes were cast, the fraud overwhelmingly stemming from polling place and registration mistakes and not from conspiracy to influence voting results.

Witnesses opposed to the bill pointed to studies that suggest it is not voter fraud that presents the real challenge to the integrity of U.S. elections, but election fraud– where ballot boxes are stuffed, votes are hidden, electronic voting machines tampered with, for example.

Advocacy groups lined up to argue against implementation of such laws. AARP spokesman Dennis Valentine reminded House members that it’s not easy for everybody to keep up-to-date forms of identification. Valentine reminded House members that not everyone has a daily need for identification, saying, “maybe you have one at 65, but not at 75 or 85. You’re not driving anymore. And if you don’t have one, it’s a long tough process to get one.”

Others, including the Collaborative ID Project’s Linda Olson, discussed the high costs that can come with attempting to secure identification. While her organization has managed to secure nearly 10,000 IDs for Coloradans in the last three years, but said more could have been secured were it not for the high cost of getting new birth certificates, social security cards, and verifying that information on both matches the state’s voter registry. 

However, the bill was not without it’s supporters. Kelly Maher, blogger for WhoSaidYouSaid, argued in favor of the bill, citing the relative ease with which she currently votes each election.

Maher testified as she has in the past to what she characterized as Colorado’s lamentable “low bar” voter ID requirements. She waved in the air the home-computer printout of an electric bill she uses as her voter ID. “This is it,” she said with dramatic irony. 

Click here to read the full text of HB 1111

(image courtesy of Rocky Mountain Independent)

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(Source: coloradoindependent.com)

Fuck yeah, Colorado!

(Source: highandlo, via coloradodaily)

Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Raises Additional 12,000 Signatures in Support of Colorado Ballot Initiative 30

Earlier this month, Secretary of State Scott Gessler announced that advocacy groups failed to raise enough signatures to place Ballot Initiative 30, a measure that would legalize the sale of marijuana in Colorado, on ballots this November. The announcement stunned supporters, many of whom were certain that the initial 160,000 signatures submitted would certainly contain the requisite 86,105 certified signatures needed, if not more. Ultimately, the secretary’s office certified 83,696 signatures, at which point Colorado state law guaranteed advocates an additional two weeks to collect an additional 2,409 signatures. 

Now, fast forward to Thursday morning. During a protest outside of President Obama’s Lakewood, Colorado campaign office, a spokesperson for the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol announced that the group has collected an additional 12,000 signatures in support of Ballot Initiative 30. While the signatures must now go through the same verification process as the initially submitted 160,000, advocates are once again certain that they have more than enough support.

The Campaign plans to deliver the newly collected signatures to Scott Gessler’s office this morning, after which they will hold a press conference featuring former Governor of New Mexico and current Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson. Former Gov. Johnson is expected to endorse the initiative, and discuss why he supports regulating marijuana similarly to alcohol.

(image courtesy of Toke of the Town)

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Colorado Court of Appeals Says Coloradans On Probation Are Not Eligible For Medical Marijuana Prescriptions

Last week, in their opinion on People vs Watkins, the Colorado Court of Appeals declared that individuals on probation are not eligible for Colorado’s medical marijuana program. The issue at hand, they said, was the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. constitution.

¶39  We therefore conclude that section 18-1.3-204(1), requiring that all probation sentences explicitly include a condition that probationers not commit offenses during the probation period, includes federal offenses and is not limited by Colorado Constitution, article XVIII, section 14.

The decision, unsurprisingly, has marijuana advocates up in arms. Denver attorney Rob Corry, a staunch advocate for medical marijuana and patients’ rights, was quick in condemning the court’s ruling.

from The Colorado Independent:

“If the Legislature had wanted people on probation to be prohibited from using medical marijuana, they would have addressed that,” Corry said. “The Legislature determined which people can and can’t use medical marijuana and they did not prohibit people on probation from using medical marijuana. It is by design that we want people on probation to have some measure of freedom and health,” Corry said, adding that for a lot of people, medical marijuana is an alternative to much more harmful–but legal–narcotics.

Corry said similar cases in Montana and California have been decided in favor of medical marijuana users. While he was not of counsel to the defendant in this case, he says he is working with a group, Sensible Colorado, to appeal for a rehearing of the case.

Corry is far from being the lone voice of discontent in the wake of the ruling. Public policy organizations around the state and country were quick to condemn the court’s decision.

Karen O’ Keefe, state policy director for the Marijuana Policy Project, was quick to express her disappointment saying, and pointed out that there is no precedent for the courts ruling on what is/isn’t acceptable medication for patients. Legalize 2012, a group pushing for full legalization in Colorado, also released an email condemning the court’s ruling.

This ruling is a huge blow to medical marijuana patients statewide, many of whom will be forced off of their safe, effective and natural cannabis medicine and forced to use dangerous and expensive pharmaceutical alternatives. For many patients, cannabis is the only medicine that works for them, especially for patients who are using cannabis as a non-toxic alternative therapy to treat their cancer.

Previously, probation departments across Colorado had wide discretion into whether or not a patient on probation would be allowed to use their medicinal cannabis. With the Court of Appeals ruling, the ability of probation officers to address individual patient situations on a case-by-case basis has been eliminated and replaced with a statewide “Zero Tolerance” policy for medical cannabis use and probation.

As of press time, it seemed that the only person in the state who was not surprised by the court’s decision was Colorado Attorney General John Suthers. In a statement, via spokesperson Mike Saccone, the Attorney General made clear that he believes “probation is a privilege, not a right”, that it comes with restrictions, and that the ruling should not have come as a shock to anyone.

As for the court of public opinion, Karen O’Keefe was quick to highlight that many Americans just aren’t as concerned with marijuana, or its consumers, as they used to be.

“Polling shows that 60 to 80 percent of Americans think medical marijuana should be legal. It is only a matter of time until federal policy catches up with the people.”

(image courtesy of the Michigan Messenger)

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