cannabisnews.com: Medical Pot Lobbying in Alaska, Pro and Con!





Medical Pot Lobbying in Alaska, Pro and Con!
Posted by FoM on December 20, 1998 at 23:25:25 PT

PETERSBURG, AK--Despite a vigorous campaign launched by the opposition just before the Nov. 3 election, Alaskans for Medical Rights were successful in garnering 57.9 percent of the vote supporting Ballot Measure 8, which allows the use of medical marijuana in Alaska.
Alaska's new medical-marijuana law puts the state in line with California, Arizona, Washington and Oregon, which now have similar legislation protecting medical-marijuana patients from prosecution. Under the Alaska statute, patients can legally possess up to an ounce of marijuana or grow as many as six plants, as long as they have a doctor's written recommendation. Those too debilitated to grow their own may have it provided by a caregiver who "has significant responsibility for managing the well-being of a patient." The state Department of Health plans to set up a registry of qualified medical-marijuana patients, though the law does not oblige patients to register in order to be protected from prosecution for possession.David Finkelstein, treasurer and spokesperson of Alaskans for Medical Rights--a spin-off of the California-based Americans for Medical Rights--said following the election that things had gone smoothly in the effort to get the measure passed, even though opponents had waged a campaign against the measure that he says was "filled with misinformation."Finkelstein said that the opponents formed about one month before the election, adopting a snappy acronym, ATOMIC--"Alaskans for the Truth on the Marijuana Initiative"--and tried desperately through a statewide advertising campaign to sway voters their way. The campaign did draw some supporters away from the measure, Finkelstein said, noting that before the campaign, a poll had showed 67 percent of the voters favoring the measure.The ATOMIC campaign caught AMR off guard, because until that time they had not seen any major competition in an organized form. AMR had known that they had some opposition from "Work Safe," a drug-testing lab in Anchorage, which according to Finkelstein is run by the director of ATOMIC.Their advertisement, placed in newspapers throughout the state, showed a picture of a father and a child which read "Hey kid, marijuana ain't bad, it's medicine. Wrong."The fine text of the ad started out complaining about "unproven and untested claims that smoking pot provides pain relief," and then itself claimed that the "American Medical Association and the American Cancer Society have rejected marijuana as medicine.""They lied by saying that the AMA had rejected it, when in fact the AMA's position is much closer to neutral, calling for more research," Finkelstein said.In addition to that advertisement, incumbent Republican Sen. Frank Murkowski made changes to his advertisements with less than a week to go before the election. Finkelstein says that Murkowski had been running ads asking voters to cast a vote for the incumbent in the election, but the week before people went to the polls, Murkowski's ad changed and urged voters to vote against Ballot Measure 8. The ad, says Finkelstein, was the worst distortion of any of the ads, with text that read, "Don't let them make Alaska a guinea pig. Medical-marijuana proponents want to use Alaska to be the guinea pig in an experiment to see if marijuana use will increase--as many believe it will." The ad went on to claim that if passed, the measure would allow anyone who makes a medical claim to grow, use and sell marijuana "with little oversight.""It was completely unrelated to what the measure says," Finkelstein commented. "But what shocked us the most was that Murkowski was not one of our listed opponents. In the last four or five days, he spent in advertising what we did during the entire campaign, which is really funny because everyone looked at us as the big spender."Finkelstein also commented that what helped their campaign was the fact that AMR used medical professionals and patients to get their message across. "Our message used patients and doctors and nurses. Theirs was all politicians and politician's spouses, and the people believed us more," he said.Finkelstein knows all about how voters react to politicians. He served eight years in the State House as a Democrat, from 1989 to 1996, after getting into office in one of the closest elections in state history. He said his time in government taught him that "they were not going to deal with controversial issues." One of his first efforts after he finished his final term was to get finance reform going in the 1996 election.Finkelstein said that Alaskans for Medical Rights will now be focusing on establishing a registration system for patients, which they hope to have set up by June 1. To date, state government agencies have not determined in detail how implementation will be handled. Brian Johnson - Special to High Times! 
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