cannabisnews.com: Legalization of Marijuana: Initiative in Jeopardy





Legalization of Marijuana: Initiative in Jeopardy
Posted by CN Staff on June 24, 2004 at 07:41:45 PT
By Erin Neff, Review-Journal
Source: Las Vegas Review-Journal 
An initiative seeking to legalize possession of up to 1 ounce of marijuana in Nevada could go up in smoke. Petition organizers last week announced that they had submitted sufficient signatures to qualify the petition for the November ballot. However, Billy Rogers, president of the political consulting firm seeking to qualify the petition, subsequently discovered a box of about 6,000 signatures that no one remembered to turn in.
Clark County Registrar Larry Lomax said Rogers contacted him by phone Saturday asking whether he could turn in the box, which contains signatures that were notarized before the June 15 deadline to submit initiative petitions. "He was pleading with me that they forgot to turn it in," Lomax said. "Unfortunately, the state law says they have to turn it all in by June 15." The oversight does not necessarily spell doom for the petition, but the mistake dramatically narrows the petition's margin for error. The Committee to Regulate and Control Marijuana must qualify in 13 of the state's 17 counties to secure a spot on the November statewide ballot. Each county requires a specific number of valid signatures. Officials did a raw count and determined that marijuana petition organizers filed a sufficient number of signatures in 14 counties. However, officials must determine how many of those signatures are valid. "The record shows that, as a general rule, 70 percent of the signatures turn out to be valid," said Steve George, spokesman for the secretary of state's office. "The rest turn out to be duplicates or people who aren't registered or people who aren't registered in that county." In Clark County, organizers submitted about 35,000 signatures in support of the marijuana petition. The minimum number of valid signatures required to qualify for the November ballot is 31,360. If the petition fails to qualify in Clark County, it would have to pass muster in each of the other 13 counties validating signatures. "They're pretty close in several other counties, and they're really cutting it close," said Renee Parker, chief deputy secretary of state. Jennifer Knight, spokeswoman for the Committee to Regulate and Control Marijuana, deferred questions to Rogers. Rogers would not comment Wednesday. On Monday, he sent Lomax a letter saying the signatures that organizers forgot to submit were notarized properly before the June 15 deadline, even though they were not discovered until Saturday. "Your refusal to accept signatures gathered prior to June 15, 2004, may disenfranchise voters who signed the petition prior to June 15, 2004," Rogers wrote. "It is our position that a remedy exists during the raw count stage of the petition drive and during the verification stage to accept the signatures and ensure that all who signed the petitions are covered." Rogers said the petitions in question are being stored in the law offices of Ross Goodman, a son of Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman. Ross Goodman was not available for comment Wednesday. Rogers, who runs the Southwest Group, has said his petition drives have a higher-than-average success rate because his paid petition gatherers stress the accuracy of the signatures at the street level. Rogers works for the Marijuana Policy Project, which is based in Washington, D.C. The group lobbies state legislatures on issues such as medical marijuana and marijuana legalization. A spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project said he was aware of the situation with the ballot qualification process in Nevada, but he referred questions to Rogers. "I don't have any relevant details," Bruce Mirken said. "It's something obviously that we're interested in." Nevada is still hyped nationally as being the first state with good potential to legalize marijuana, in part because of the state's liberal initiative petition laws and also because voters already have approved the use of marijuana for medical reasons. However, voters in 2002 overwhelmingly defeated an effort to legalize up to 3 ounces of marijuana. The vote was 61 to 39 percent. This year's petition seeks to amend the Nevada Constitution to legalize possession of 1 ounce of marijuana sold, licensed and regulated by the state. It also increases penalties for driving under the influence of a controlled substance and for selling marijuana to minors. If it qualifies for the ballot, voters would have to approve it in November and again in 2006 before it could take effect.Note: Organizers forgot to turn in box containing 6,000 signatures.Complete Title: Legalization of Marijuana: Error Puts Initiative in JeopardySource: Las Vegas Review-Journal (NV)Author: Erin Neff, Review-JournalPublished: Thursday, June 24, 2004Copyright: 2004 Las Vegas Review-JournalContact: letters lvrj.comWebsite: http://www.lvrj.com/Related Articles & Web Site:Marijuana Policy Projecthttp://www.mpp.org/Marijuana Legalizers Not Giving Up Yethttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread19039.shtmlAnother Try at Legalizing Marijuanahttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread17928.shtmlThe Drug Legalizers Are At It Againhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread13321.shtml 
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Comment #6 posted by Richard Paul Zuckerm on June 24, 2004 at 11:04:25 PT:
WHO IS THIS KNUCKLEHEAD "BILLY ROGERS"?
If Billy Rogers contracted to obtain the requisite number of signatures and he had enough signatures but failed to turn in a box or two of signatures, then Billy Rogers is in breach of his agreement, even if it is only negligence and not recklessness or fraud! He should be ordered to pay back all of the money he was paid for his efforts to obtain signatures! Who is this KNUCKLEHEAD Billy Rogers, anyway?
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Comment #5 posted by siege on June 24, 2004 at 10:39:35 PT
administration
the Bush administration in Nevada to criticizes the legalize of marijuana. how much soft-money this time.
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Comment #4 posted by FoM on June 24, 2004 at 10:29:45 PT
Related Article from The Associated Press
Marijuana Initiative Backers Forgot 6,000 Signatures June 24, 2004It turns out the leaders of a drive to legalize possession of up to one ounce of marijuana in Nevada forgot to turn in six-thousand petition signatures in Las Vegas. That threatens to undercut claims that they collected enough names in Clark County to qualify for the November ballot. County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax says it's too late now to accept a forgotten box of signatures from petition leader Billy Rogers. They were due June 15th. Rogers has sent a letter to Lomax suggesting the Committee to Regulate and Control Marijuana may challenge the deadline. If it fails to qualify in Clark County, the committee will need to qualify in all 13 other counties where leaders say they turned in enough signatures to get a spot on the statewide November ballot. Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press
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Comment #3 posted by Virgil on June 24, 2004 at 09:22:48 PT
Was Billy bribed?
I do not think so, but how could someone make such a big blunder? He should be terminated.Nevada is still hyped nationally as being the first state with good potential to legalize marijuanaThis is kind of a garbled sentence. The state with the best chance to first legalize laughing grass is Alaska.Orrin Hatch wants to ban P2P networks. The disguise of such measure has to do with copyright. There are already copyright laws that have been made absurd in their scope by the corporate takeover of America, with a fantasyland five media giant, Disney, being the main character. This is about stopping the Internet's effect of waking people from their slumber that has ruined the cause of democracy here and around the world to a domination by multi-national corporations.Here is the link to a search at Google News for "Orrin Hatch P2P"- http://tinyurl.com/2dcazI want to copy a few paragraphs from a Znet link concerning the Canadian elections and propaganda. This is one of the best articles I have ever read concerning the need to control the media. It might not be a must read, but it is a should read for sure- http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=5752I have a new word to present and will use it some other time. Maybe someone could apply it to the media/propaganda and the cannabis attitude of government. The word is tautology.Here is a little from the zmag link- Aware of this context, one might wonder why there has been nary a mention of these issues during the election campaign. Understanding the fundamental role played by corporate propaganda is essential here. In the late 80's, Alex Carey summed up "three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." [3]The intent of corporate propaganda is to secure a "propaganda-managed" or "low-risk" democracy. By rigidly narrowing and controlling the terms of debate, serious issues will not be discussed. By "controlling the public mind" corporate propaganda also guarantees consent for this deliberately narrow framing of discourse. As important as the issue of terrorism is to corporate stakeholders, it does not merit the attention of the Canadian public, evidently, who instead encouraged to focus their attention on such issues as abortion, same-sex marriage, child pornography and hospital waiting times.The voting Canadian public is treated as though they are children who lack the capacity to rationally discuss issues of great importance; the war on terrorism being one of several similarly omitted issues from the election radar. While this deifies conventional definitions of democracy, it is in perfect accord with 'propaganda managed democracy'.The presumed intellectual immaturity of the public informs the line of questioning as found in the extensive election polling that is feverishly conducted by large polling corporations on behalf of mostly telecommunications corporations. Polling in fact comprises one phase of the 'election propaganda loop' where each of the politicians, media, and polling companies appear as though they are independent of one another but are in fact part of this 'mutually reinforcing' feedback loop. The corporate media and politicians produce and drive the issues, while the polls validate them. All are owned or controlled by corporate ideology.Jacques Ellul describes the mentality that goes into the "opinion survey" in his Propaganda:"[T]o place propaganda efforts on the intellectual level would require that the propagandist engage in individual debate with each person - an unthinkable method. It is necessary to obtain at least a minimum of participation from everybody." [4]SES Research is conducting nightly polls during the election on behalf on cable-industry owned CPAC [sister station to the US's C-Span, both of which resolutely tow the corporate line]. SES Research's website links through to one of its "partners", Summa Strategies Canada, who pride themselves as having been "directly involved in several of the major commercialization/privatization initiatives in Canada of the last ten years." The Chairperson of Summa is Douglas Young, Canada's former Minister of Defence, who also serves on several other corporate boards, including Magellan Aerospace Company.Similarly, it is the case that Ipsos-Reid, another major polling company, has recently entered into a partnership with the Associ ated Press, who boast to serving as a source of [heavily distorted] news.for more than one billion people a day." Who better to conduct research of public opinion than those who shape it?The corporate election propaganda loop has no interest in a dissenting public opinion and is profoundly undemocratic. The existing structure of independent media is not yet in a position to offer a serious enough challenge to this calculus. The corporate hegemons are keeping an eye on alternative media, and it would seem, are quietly enacting the legislation that will pre-emptively try to silence the voice of political dissidents and activists who are gradually helping raise the soma-induced consciousness of the depoliticised, heavily indoctrinated masses. The most serious issue to be addressed, perhaps, is the reality of disempowerment. One of the reasons that people don't care - or at least seem not to -about the horrifying realities of the world today is due in part to the deep sense of powerlessness that corporate propaganda forces people to internalise.Fundamentally, the risk to corporations of a genuinely democratic political consciousness is great, therefore the corporate propagandist must combat this by whatever means possible. In light of current events elsewhere, such as throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, one can look at conditions in Canada from the perspective of destabilization. One of the reasons that Canada is in a position to destabilize others [such as Haiti] is because the Canadian population itself is in a state of permanent destabilization. The goal of destabilization is to prevent the masses from exercising their human right to self-determination. A propaganda-managed democracy can only be pulled off once the public has relinquished this human right. The election propaganda loop is tasked with providing the illusion that this is not so.Clearly, corporate propagandists are the real terrorists, representing the impetus for the gravest threat currently facing not only Canadians, but all of humanity. There is a sliver of hope in the upcoming election. The NDP, whom the Conservatives and Liberals ridicule as a second-rate political party, giving their leader Jack Layton a [relative] Ralph Nader treatment, are proposing to repeal the Anti-Terrorist Act, Bill C-36, that set the stage for the National Security Policy in 2001. The NDP, while submitting to the corporate election template, seem to have genuinely progressive positions on several of the otherwise omitted issues. In the context of whether or not to vote for the NDP, Stephen Shalom makes a good point in his argument that can be applied to the Canadian election:
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Comment #2 posted by dididadadidit on June 24, 2004 at 08:44:50 PT
Short Term Memory Loss?
Good heavens. Are we incapable of remembering to turn in the names after going to the trouble of getting them? It would appear the efforts need sympathetic, but straight, legal help, correlating, orchestrating the appropo moves in accordance with regulations. I hope they pull this out and don't have to sit out for another two years and miss this shot, when we may have a Repugnican clean sweep rout in November (Dems had not won a house special election in 13 years until South Dakota and Kentucky this year, now both ex Repug seats).Really makes us look bad when we feed right in to the Cheech and Chong stupid stoner image. Ah well, so much recent good news, gotta expect more bumps in the road.Cheers?
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Comment #1 posted by JR Bob Dobbs on June 24, 2004 at 08:44:46 PT
Life imitates comedy
"You know why they'll never legalize marijuana? Because nobody can remember where they put the petitions!" - George CarlinUnfortunately, it's none too funny when it happens for real. Wonder if this'll be in the next MPP newsletter?
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