New medical marijuana initiative launched in Arkansas

Dear Friend:

I am happy to announce that Arkansas voters will probably have the opportunity to vote on a statewide medical marijuana ballot initiative on November 2, thanks to the hard work of local citizens and the assistance of the Marijuana Policy Project.

If passed by a majority of voters, the initiative would make Arkansas the ninth state to protect patients from arrest—and the tenth to protect them from jail. (Maryland protects patients from jail but not from arrest.)

Please visit the Arkansas Alliance to read all about this new initiative or go straight to /donate0918 to lend your financial support to the campaign.

This initiative is the fruition of four months of work by the Arkansas Alliance for Medical Marijuana and MPP. Arkansas law requires that proposed initiatives be submitted for review to the attorney general, who may reject or approve them—and ours was rejected five times!

Undeterred and determined to find language that the state government would permit on the ballot, we finally succeeded. The attorney general accepted the initiative—on our sixth try—on March 12.

If passed by Arkansas voters in November, the initiative would:

• protect seriously ill patients who use marijuana with their doctors? approval—as well as their caregivers—from arrest and prosecution by state authorities;

• permit qualifying patients or their caregivers to cultivate their own marijuana for medical use, with limits on the amount they could possess;

• create registry identification cards, so that law-enforcement officials will be able to determine who is a qualified patient and who is not; and

• allow patients and their caregivers who are arrested (for whatever reason) to discuss their medical use in court.

Now the campaign must collect 64,465 valid signatures by July 2 in order to place the initiative on the November 2 ballot.

Collecting those signatures—as well as promoting the campaign through TV ads and other media—will be expensive. Please visit /donate0918 and make a financial contribution today.

If you would like to earn money to work on the Arkansas campaign (or MPP's campaigns in three other states), please follow the instructions at /jobs/availablejobs.html to collect signatures for the campaign. (Note that the canvassing is being coordinated by an outside firm; please do not contact MPP with questions.)

Thanks in advance for anything you can do to help get this campaign off the ground!

Sincerely,

Rob Kampia

Executive Director

Marijuana Policy Project

Washington, D.C.