Medicine Socks December 27 at 8:49am
The snow was just starting to fly when Cloudy arrived, a first timer to the meeting who had shared some good ideas on the MassCann listserve, and Matt made it from Boston to yesterday's small gathering here at casa de Norman & Rachel. So we were a council of 4 yesterday. Kathryn would have driven through the elements to be here but we'd actually managed to dissuade her, worried enough about conditions on the road to ask her to stay put rather than schlepp from Boston all the way here and back. Adam emailed to say something had come up, and I was a bit stressy and kinda feeling like calling it a snow day but resolved to welcome whoever arrived.
Matt liked the ambiance of our humble booklined hovel and expressed appreciation for the chance to see us in our natural habitat so to speak. He too, seeemed much softer than I'd perceived him in public settings. What a sweetie! Matt told us he had spoken with staffers in Smizik's office and with Smizik himself, I believe, in the past couple of weeks. He said the staffers were enthused and Smizik was somewhat open to looking at the changes we suggested, but perhaps not willing to make all the changes. Scott also had that impression, he'd shared in emails that he decided to focus on what he felt were 3 or 4 key changes...
not leave list of ailments up to Dept of health,
make that doctor patient decision not govt agency policy
ID card not mandatory
protection from eviction for patients in federal housing
and I'm forgetting what else... can ask Matt or Scott for details of those meetings...
what else did we talk about at our meeting?
contacting reps. everybody needs to get their own district's state rep at least to co sponsor, that is, sign onto the MMJ bill. it's easy, all they have to do is contact the bill's first sponsor, Frank Smizik's office, and indicate their willingness to do so.. We should keep track of who has gotten in touch with their reps, whose reps have gotten back to them and whether rep has signed or is willing to sign.
we talked about the ASA conference in February in Worcester... lots of good reasons to participate in that event and to become an ASA chapter...ASA is a great resource we agreed.
We talked about looking at this Massachusetts MMJ campaign as a 2 year process and part of a much longer, more wholistic effort to repeal prohibition on the federal level, and about pacing ourselves and avoiding burnout by not trying to do too much too soon. Nonetheless there is stuff we can be doing now: getting as many reps as we can to sponsor the MA MMJ bill, becoming an ASA chapter, maybe a fundraising campaign down the road, maybe a referendum in 2012, planning local events, doing what we can to form a tite local community of patient-activists, some good things to think on for now...
Hu your name came up, Matt has been following you a bit & here we've been enjoying getting to know you through your online persona. So we haven't set another meeting date or time til we know what could work for you?
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