Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007
Subject: #354 Medicinal Marijuana In The News
MEDICINAL MARIJUANA IN THE NEWS
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DrugSense FOCUS Alert #345 – Wednesday, 4 April 2007
On Monday, April 2nd, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson signed New
Mexico’s medical marijuana legislation into law – making New Mexico
the 12th state to have legislation which provides some degree of
protection from state marijuana laws for patients authorized by their
doctors to use marijuana.
Unfortunately, this historic event received little media coverage. CNN
Headline News provided a fair but quick announcement frequently on
Tuesday. But even within New Mexico press coverage was not extensive.
One reason could have been that the press knew that the Governor would
sign the bill. Another could have been that newspaper editors saw the
spin given by the Associated Press wire service to the story as
inappropriate, even false. See http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v07/n431/a03.html
Since there were New Mexico Republicans who voted for the bill – and
the AP didn’t identify which Republicans thought that the Governor
supported the bill for other than compassionate reasons – we wonder if
even a majority of the Republicans in the state legislature would
endorse the cheap shot in the AP story.
Our best link to articles about the New Mexico law we have is
http://www.mapinc.org/people/Bill+Richardson
The push is on to pass medicinal marijuana bills in a number of other
states, so it is possible that another state or two, maybe more, may
pass laws this year. An example is an OPED that appeared Tuesday in
the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which was aimed at the southwest part of
Illinois where the paper has a substantial market – designed to
increase support for the Illinois medicinal marijuana bill. See
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v07/n429/a06.html
Every day MAP archives news clippings about medicinal marijuana worthy
of your letter to the editor writing efforts, easily found at this
link http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm
No, our volunteers do not find all the medicinal marijuana news items
printed. Please check your local newspapers for stories. Local folks
writing to their newspapers frequently find more respect from readers
– and often higher chances of being printed – than those who write
from far away
We thank you for your efforts, be it writing letters, newshawking, or
taking other actions from the local – city, county, state – to
national and international levels in support of providing safe access
for patients to medicinal marijuana.
Thanks for your effort and support.
It’s not what others do it’s what YOU do.
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Additional suggestions for writing LTEs are at our Media Activism Center:
http://www.mapinc.org/resource/#guides
Or contact MAP Media Activism Facilitator Steve Heath for tips on how
to write LTEs that get printed.
heath@mapinc.org
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Don’t Miss MAP’s New & Improved Online Media Activism Conferences
Join Steve and other LTE writing friends Tuesday evenings at 9 p.m.
Eastern, 8 p.m. Central, 7 p.m. Mountain, or 6 p.m. Pacific for a
roundtable discussion of how to write LTEs that are likely to be printed.
We’ve added a Thursday roundtable at a later hour – 11 p.m. Eastern,
10 p.m. Central, 9 p.m. Mountain, or 8 p.m. Pacific,
See http://mapinc.org/resource/teamspeak/ for easy directions on how
to download, install and use the free TeamSpeak software. It runs on
Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.
Discussion is conducted with live Voice (microphone and speakers are
all that is needed) and also via text messaging.
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PLEASE SEND US COPIES OF YOUR LETTERS
Please post copies of your letter writing efforts – or report your
other actions – to the sent letter list ( sentlte@mapinc.org ) if you
are signed up for that list, or by emailing copies directly to
heath@mapinc.org if you are not. Your letter will then be forwarded to
the list so others can learn from your efforts.
Joining the Sent LTE list ( sentlte@mapinc.org ) will help you to
review other sent LTEs and perhaps come up with new ideas or
approaches as well as keeping others aware of your important writing
efforts.
To join the Sent LTE email list see
http://www.mapinc.org/lists/index.htm#form
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Prepared by: The MAP Media Activism Team www.mapinc.org/resource
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