What’s Next for FLCAN

Even though lawmakers did not take up the Cathy Jordan Medical Cannabis Act in 2013, Florida CAN isn’t daunted or distracted from our mission. We are more determined than ever to see safe, therapeutic access to cannabis for people in Florida.

You can check out our reports about the legislative session but in short it was exciting, eye opening and encouraging. One southwest Florida lawmaker started our meeting by saying he KNEW cannabis was Safer than alcohol. A second owns a nursery business, he knows cannabis is an up and coming market and he wants in too. The battle was half won – at least they know the truth and for some of them its important. Now, getting them to act on the truth… another in a series of challenging things for CAN to accomplish.

For now, Florida CAN is ready for the next chapter.

The addition of Florida trial attorney, John Morgan, onto the list of Floridians actively working to change cannabis laws puts Florida squarely on course for some sort of legal medical cannabis scheme. Whether through an act of the Feds, through our state legislature or by popular vote in November 2014, legal medical access is coming to Florida.

To support the efforts of Floridians to change cannabis laws, we took a lease on a wonderful office just west of US 1 in Melbourne, FL. We need help now getting the place ready for the public. You can follow our progress here on our blog, on this page dedicated to opening the office, on our website or on Facebook.

Whether it is a gathering place for training, a collection site for petitions, a workspace for talented writers, graphic artists, would be video producers or a fun place to host a Sunday members-only pot-luck dinner, the office is going to be a great addition to the Florida reform efforts.

Our soft opening is June 19.  By the soft opening, we plan to have programs in place, jobs for volunteers and an idea what hours make sense for our volunteers and staff. We hope the public will embrace our July 14 grand opening. Our grand opening ribbon cutting ceremony will be at 12:30 July 14. We hope you’ll mark your calendar and make an extra effort to be counted among the faithful who will see cannabis safe, legal and available in Florida.

The 900 Pound Gorilla in the Room

So here we are, over 40 years since the passage of the Federal Controlled Substance Act and the overriding moral of the story seems to be prohibition still doesn’t work. About 10 years ago, when I was working with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a friend and I were working around the clock to help people understand the failures of prohibition. We sat in room after room with people working on the ancillary issues caused by prohibition. We felt it was easy to see the real damage was created by prohibition and the rest were symptoms. We called prohibition the 900 pound gorilla in the room that no one wanted to discuss.

In an e-mail exchange today a new ally called prohibition the dead elephant in the room. In a Republican led legislature we don’t take stabs at elephants, but none the less ….

Whether you want to call it a dead 900 pound gorilla or a dead elephant the metaphor is working for me. I like the idea that we have gone from a big, damn beast – screeching – terrifying and something no one wanted to face, to a carcass. A stinking mess even. So how do you get a dead gorilla out of the middle of a room, unfortunately the answer may be – one piece at a time.

I’ve never been much of an incrementalist. I worked with cops calling for the end of prohibition and when you look at the likes of Al Capone and the corruption laid out in shows like the HBO drama Boardwalk Empire, you have to look twice at prohibition. But prohibition is a huge beast.

Our medical cannabis bill in the Florida House and Senate isn’t perfect, but it begins the process of cutting the dead gorilla into manageable pieces. Even I had no idea how illegal cannabis is in Florida. Statute after statute makes cannabis a little more illegal. So while HB 1139 and SB 1250 are only talking about medical access to cannabis and does nothing for the 40,000 people arrested in Florida for under 20 grams of cannabis, it does takes patients out of the criminal justice system and that is a good place to start.

We need good policies. We want cannabis policies that increase public safety, protect patients and provide the public with piece of mind. We need the stinking beast out of the room and we can do this, even if it means tackling the beast one piece at a time.





Day 8 of the legislative session
52 days left to bring safe, legal access to Florida in 2013.

Why the Drug War Puts Drug Dealers in our Middle Schools

Survey after survey, from schools across the country are telling us the same story, echoing what our own children are telling us; it’s easier to get some illegal drugs than alcohol or cigarettes. Often students will assert that they can get marijuana within 15 minutes to an hour. How did we get to this point? It’s not from a lack of effort, or funding. We were willing to fund what ever the never ending drug war seemed to require (asked for). 

Well  folks, the fact is that when a society prohibits the use or possession of something that is in demand, the distribution system changes and costs go up. Way up! The reality is, when you prohibit something you’re saying, “No one can have this. No one can sell it or produce it etc., without the threat of criminal penalties.” You’re giving up any real control.

Under prohibition, demand won’t disappear and users will have to pay more to continue buying and using. Eventually they’ll pay a lot more. They’ll have to, because the manufacturing is risky, the distribution is risky, and sales are risky. Everyone in the loop is now a criminal and subject to serious penalties. Everyone in the chain must make enough of money to balance their risks of being arrested and jailed, or robbed and beaten, or worse. The prices go way up. With high profits at stake criminal organizations stand to make a lot of money providing parts or all of these services. Their profits probably won’t be used to build new schools in your neighborhood or fund neighborhood healthcare. Legal sales of regulated and taxed substances could fund these types of things.

 When the criminal justice system (which is now at a much higher risk of corruption from these impressive profits made by people willing to work outside the law) manages to incarcerate these new entrepreneurs, they’re replaced the next day with others who see the opportunity worth taking the risk. Meanwhile we pay for the jail time, and court time, and support for his or her family now that they’ve lost a bread winner. It doesn’t seem like any of this prohibition has helped us out in the least! A thoughtful person can easily make a good case that this series of ill-advised laws passed over the years have done little except exacerbate the situation. More drugs being used, more arrests, more spent on prisons enforcement, eradication, gang problems, corruption, etc. have been the result.

These “entrepreneurs” (drug dealers) can be quite clever when it comes to protecting themselves from the law. It’s common for a mid level dealer (that means there is a lot of them) to work with local kids under 18 to “help” with his sales/distribution business. Since the advent of the zero tolerance laws passed in school settings, these students risk much more than they realize. Who do you think these local kids will contact to expand their sales? Their friends, your kid’s school chums.

So what do we do?

·         Educate, educate, educate. Real information, honest discussions. Join a group like FLCAN and educate yourself, your friends and family.

·          Change our laws to regulate these banned substances. Then we gain control. Control over quality, strength, storage, distribution (we card folks for beer, right?) and more.

·          Reconsider our drug testing policies in schools. The results of the testing have prompted the use of “harder” drugs that pass through the body more quickly than cannabis. Drug testing may keep “at risk” kids out of band, or football or any other extracurricular, the exact activities that help kids stay away from drugs. Let’s see if what we’re doing is working or not. 

L   Learn from history. We’ve been here before with alcohol prohibition. We saw the results of prohibition as we looked back at alcohol laws' consequences in our history. Prohibition bred the gangs, the drive by shootings, the turf wars, the corruption of government and police, the increasing production of whiskey instead of beer and much more.

 This doesn’t look like a drug war. It looks like a gift to those who are willing take a little risk to make a lot of money and not pay taxes on it. It looks like a gift to private prisons. It looks like a way to control people of color who are arrested far more than white people who actually use more drugs per capita. It works to disenfranchise certain aspects of society when they lose their voting rights.

Now we’re seeing the unintended consequences of our generation’s prohibition, “The War on Drugs”.  What is sad, is we never saw the results we were trying to achieve.

·         It’s up to us to say, “Enough, this isn’t working, it’s costing us a fortune, it’s risking our kids and our future!” What else needs to be said?