By Allen St. Pierre, NORML Executive Director
There are thousands of licensed cannabis-related businesses these days in states like Colorado, Washington and California; and soon enough too in Alaska and Oregon. Medical cannabis-related businesses also dot the national landscape as well.
When Californians were the first in 1996 to cast votes in favor of allowing medical access to cannabis, with a near singular message of ‘compassion’ for patients that need therapeutic access to the plant. Advocates for the passage of Prop. 215 (including NORML) didn’t envisage that the initiative did more than two primary things:
-exempt from criminal arrest and prosecution medical patients who possess physician’s recommendation to use cannabis as a therapeutic
-allow for ‘compassionate’ access through collectives that, ideally, were to be not for profit
Well…culture, custom, commerce and the free market–not too surprisingly–largely came to trump compassion as a primary impetus for a medical cannabis collective’s being. The hundreds of medical cannabis businesses that currently exist in California labor under laws originally meant for lending legal protections for ‘self-preservation’ and ‘collectivism’ regarding how medical cannabis was to be a distributed to the sick, dying and sense-threatened.
However, one genuine cannabis patient collective has managed to survive for 20 years, the Santa Cruz-based WAMM.
Headed by NORML Advisory board member and MS patient Valerie Corral, WAMM has been a remarkable leader in legal challenges to federal encroachment, medical and botanical research. WAMM provides a comfortable, nurturing and inviting environment–physically and emotionally–to women and men who need therapeutic access to cannabis, in safe environs and who want to be part of a community that cultivates and shares the cannabis grown amongst the collective’s members.
Please see links to related articles about the current challenges WAMM faces at High Times and Good Times.
If possible, please make a timely donation to Save WAMM!
Via:: Norml News