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‘Legalize Virginia’ to Elevate the Discussion Around Marijuana Reform

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Update: Legalize Virginia has been rescheduled to next week, starting Sept. 18.

Last week the Board of Pharmacy Ad Hoc Committee met to determine which companies will be the first to be able to open medical cannabis dispensaries in Virginia.

Yes, they met behind closed doors. And no, the current law is not enough. But that doesn’t change the fact that what is happening right now is a huge, huge step for marijuana in Virginia.

Within the next year, you will be able to bring a form signed by your doctor to a regulated business in the Commonwealth, and there, they will give you an oil derived from a marijuana plant grown on site. It’s just the beginning for those very lucky five business license holders, who you can expect to fiercely try to attract as many patient customers through their doors as possible.

When you picture the folks waiting in line at those dispensaries, I urge you to think of the hundreds of thousands of people in Virginia with genuine illnesses and conditions, who genuinely will find solace and healing from medical marijuana.

Think of my friend Creed Leffler, who has Cerebral Palsy. He calls marijuana the “miracle plant” for the way it helps his muscles relax. “There is no such thing as recreational marijuana,” Leffler said. “It’s all medicinal.”

Creed Leffler

The list of the ailments that can be treated with marijuana is longer than your arm. Check out this chart. Chronic pain, epilepsy, PTSD, ALS, cancer, diabetes — the list goes on and on. The stories are heartbreaking.

Melanie Seifert Davis’s daughter Maddie has been fighting metastatic brain cancer since she was five. “Because of the use of multiple cannabis products, Madison lives a life free of pain, seizures or any limiting deficits, and full of the joys of childhood all children deserve,” said Davis, an ER nurse. “My degree in Biology and my years in the trenches of modern medicine have enabled me to make treatment decisions for my family that rely on evidence-based best practices and emerging research findings, including the multitude of medical benefits that can be derived from marijuana.”

Melanie Seifert Davis’ with her daughter Maddie

I expect marijuana law reform in Virginia to move relatively quickly from here. Expect the businesses granted licenses to be a part of the army of voices banging the drum for even more cannabis law reform in the Commonwealth. The organization I am a part of, Virginia NORML, will be pushing for a decriminalization bill this upcoming General Assembly.

There is hope. There is a plan. And there’s also going to be a party.

Virginia NORML is working with Norfolk’s O’Connor Brewing Company to push the conversation forward with Legalize Virginia Festival, a week-long series of workshops, panels, events, and activities all diving into a different aspect of reform.

Last Monday, the group held “Marijuana Saved My Life: Cannabis as Medicine in Virginia,” a forum on the new medical cannabis law, who it will help, and how to talk to your doctor about it, with Virginia NORML Executive Director Jenn Michelle Pedini leading the panel. Lisa Bohn, a Purple Heart veteran who uses cannabis to help her cope with PTSD, along with Davis and Leffler, will also speak on the panel. On Tuesday, Sept. 18, the festival will hold the “Equity and Expungement: Talking Marijuana and Race in Virginia” panel, which will look at the disparity in arrest rates among white Virginians and Virginians of color, the expungement of records of those with marijuana offenses, and more. Norfolk NAACP President Joe Dillard, Bill Farrar, director of public policy and communications for ACLU of Virginia, and expungement and restoration of rights attorney Wanda Cooper will serve on the panel. Thursday’s discussion will dive into what cities in Virginia can do about cannabis law reform.

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All forums run from 7 to 8 pm at O’Connor Brewing Company and followed by more informal workshops. Tonight, there will be a workshop on growing hops and hemp, on Tuesday will be a workshop on entering the cannabis industry, and on Thursday there will be a workshop on how to be a kick-ass marijuana activist.

Friday, Sept. 21 is the festival atmosphere. O’Connor is releasing a special beer they’re brewing with hemp seeds, called “YES, NORFOLK CAN(yon),” a pale ale modeled after their Norfolk Canyon brew. There will be a ton of pop-ups as part of NOMARAMA’s Munchie Market, a killer list of independent vendors, DJs, a pop-up yoga class, and a retro arcade. The festival runs from 3 pm to midnight.

The fact that O’Connor Brewing Co., a major name in Virginia craft beer, is hosting this series of events is, in-and-of-itself, a testament to the new day for marijuana in Virginia.

This issue is out of the shadows. Soon, we’ll be walking into legal dispensaries in the light of day. And what a beautiful day that will be.

You can check out the entire schedule for Legalize Virginia here.

A Magnificent Monument to Satan Unveiled Outside the Capitol Building in Arkansas

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An image made in the likeness of the dark lord himself, aka, Lucifer: The Fallen, The Morning Star, The Great Deceiver,  Old Nick, Mayor of Hell, Apollyon, briefly appeared outside the Capitol building in Little Rock, Arkansas, yesterday, and it was magnificent.

The “Satan Went Down to Arkansas” rally, held by the Temple of Satan (bless them), showcased a giant statue of Baphomet – a deity linked to the Knights Templar in the early 14th Century – which they hope to install permanently to live side by side with a controversial statue of the Ten Commandments that currently adorns the grounds of the state Capitol.

The Great Unveiling. Photo by Nick Fish

The statue of Baphomet proposed by the Satanists has been in response to Arkansas State Senator Jason Rapert’s successful campaign to place a sculpture of the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the Arkansas State Capitol. In justifying his decision to support the placement of religious iconography on public property, he said in a Facebook post, “Due process was followed to the letter of the law when the Secretary of State and the Capitol Arts and Grounds Commission held a series of open and public meetings to gather input on the placing of the Ten Commandments monument.”

In the same post made yesterday, he also refers to the groups of Satanists and their magnificent statue of Baphomet as “extremists” and called them “profane.” For their part, the Satanists have framed it as a matter of free speech, not one that places any specific value on “satanic” theologies. The co-founder of Satanic Arkansas, who was at the rally yesterday, told US News and World Report that, “if you’re going to have one religious monument up then it should be open to others, and if you don’t agree with that then let’s just not have any at all.” In his opening remarks, Temple of Satan spokesman and co-founder Lucien Greaves thanked Rapert, claiming that without his push for the Christian monument there would be no legal precedent for them to place their own statue. Addressing the crowd, Greaves said, “Baphomet is not an attack on the Ten Commandments. It is an insistence on equality under the law.”

Anti-Satan Protestors. Photo by Lucien Greaves

The issue will now be decided in the courts in what is likely to be a First Amendment case that will have serious ramifications on how the separation of church and state is decided. Earlier this year the Satanist tried to join a case the ACLU already brought against the state of Arkansas, but for reasons unclear the ACLU asked the courts to “bar the intervention.”

Regardless of legal outcomes, the Satanists seem to be winning in the court of public decision. As one commentator on Rapert’s Facebook page put it, “The profane is pretty awesome though. Hail Satan.”

Hail Satan.

Despite High Costs & Unequal Enforcement, Decriminalization Remains Out Of Reach In VA

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While most of Virginia may be enjoying some good, old-fashioned reefer madness today, at least 22,000 people will be left out this year, paying fines and sitting in jail as decriminalization efforts have failed to take effect. Most of them are Black.

Sorry to bring down your high.

“[Decriminalization] is an urgent criminal justice and racial justice issue in Virginia that lawmakers should be taking more seriously,” said Bill Farrar, director of strategic communications at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

According to a study conducted by ACLU, 8.2 million arrests are made each year for marijuana possession, while people of color are 3.72 more likely to be arrested for possession. Farrar stated that in certain areas of Virginia, they are eight times as likely to be arrested. Those arrested are most often carrying less than an ounce of marijuana, yet have exorbitant fees and often spend time in jail. Currently, being caught with less than half an ounce is a misdemeanor, but anything over a half ounce is considered a felony.

“The commonwealth spends nearly three quarters of a billion dollars each year enforcing a law that dramatically and disparately entangles people of color in the criminal justice system, while neglecting to fund programs to help people with mental illness or directly address the growing opioid problem,” Farrar said.

This past General Assembly session, two senators presented bills with decriminalization efforts and both failed at the Courts of Justice committee level, meaning they never reached the floor for a general vote.

“It’s important to note that African-Americans only make up 20 percent of Virginia’s population yet are arrested three times more than whites for marijuana possession when use is equal between races,” said Jenn Michelle Pedini, executive director at Virginia NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) who assisted Senator Adam Ebbin in writing Senate Bill 111, which would decriminalize marijuana and reduce charges to a simple $50 fine on the first offense with subsequent fine increase to $100 and $250 for second and third offenses.

“You have to work with intent to suss out 20 percent of your population and target them three times more,” Pedini said. “That’s not unique, we see it play out throughout the country, and it’s not to say that law enforcement is inherently biased against African-Americans, or explicitly biased, more likely it is them exercising their implicit bias. This is how systemic oppression plays out in America.”

In addition to this systemic oppression, both Farrar and Pedini cited gross spending habits by the Virginia state government to continue arrests for marijuana possession. According to a study by the Drug Policy Alliance, Virginia spends $70 million annually on marijuana possession arrests and prosecutions alone.

“That is more than the Commonwealth has budgeted for the current fiscal year for statewide capital improvements to transportation and natural resources combined, and 14 percent more than the amount of general funds budgeted to support the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services – which deals with mental health and substance abuse treatment, among other things – for the entire 2016-18 biennium,” Senator Ebbin said in a statement to the General Assembly in February.

In 2016, many activists and politicians worked to find money for processing thousands of backlogged rape test kits and struggled to find it. “We didn’t have a few thousand dollars to see who had raped someone, then had to waste time and money arguing about how to find a couple million dollars to process those backlogged kits,” Pedini said. “Meanwhile, pot possession, which has little or no public safety impact, we have $70 million for.”

A portion of this spending is for programs like the Virginia Alcohol Safety Action Program (VASAP), a court-ordered addiction clinic. Twenty-one percent of those ordered to VASAP are there for marijuana possession, equal to the percent sent in for opioid and heroin.

“If we stopped this waste of taxpayer dollars and instead decriminalized, removed that six months to one year rehab requirement, you would immediately double access to treatment for opioid and heroin addiction,” Pedini said.

Senator Tommy Norment promised during his campaign to put forward a decriminalization bill as well, but later reduced it to an expungement bill. Both Farrar and Pedini were disappointed in this change, and Senator Ebbin openly objected to it on the Assembly floor.

“The members of these subcommittees are primarily prosecutors, and they’re not interested in passing legislation that limits or reduces their prosecutorial discretion,” Pedini said.

In a 2018 poll released by Virginia Commonwealth University, eight out of ten Virginians said they would prefer reducing the marijuana possession misdemeanor conviction to a fine and are in favor of reform.

“Virginians want us to decriminalize marijuana possession, not to create a new fish trap that doesn’t do anything to address the racial disparities in our current criminal justice system nor address the high costs of continuing to criminalize simple possession,” Senator Ebbin said.

Pedini and Farrar are hopeful that Senator Ebbin’s bill will pass in 2020 after the 2019 elections.

“We’re ruining people’s lives with this… We don’t need some tiny half step to pretend like that’s reform,” Pedini said. “We need real reform, and that’s decriminalization. This criminal charge is going to follow people for the rest of their lives, can lead to them losing their children, being evicted, losing their job, losing their scholarships.”

Image by Vivienne Lee

ACLU Reporting that Phone Calls are Falsely Telling People Their Polling Places have Changed

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The Virginia Pilot is reporting that the ACLU is claiming that some person(s) or organization(s) have been calling voters and telling them their polling location has changed. Director of strategic communications Bill Farrar has said that there has been a multitude of reports supporting this, but that it was hard to determine whether or not they were all original reports or just re-shares on social media.

Farrar has also said that these reports have emerged from Prince William County and that the phone numbers making the calls have originated in Gloucester County, Virginia and Adairsville, Georgia.

In a Tweet from a few hours ago, the ACLU shared a message that claimed these calls were specifically targeting Democratic voters and that “we have notified voter protection and they were already aware of the situation.”

Voters can find out where their official polling place is here.

Opinion: Dawn Adams, a Candidate for the Community

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Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Dawn Adams over the phone. Adams is the Democratic candidate for the 2017 Virginia House of Delegates election in the 68th district, which includes parts of Chesterfield, Henrico, and Richmond. Adams has spent over 20 years working in the Richmond area as a registered nurse, nurse practitioner, access to care researcher, and health advocate. She’s also the Director of the Office of Integrated Health for VA’s Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services. She won the Old Dominion University Nursing Scholar award for her research project based around reducing healthcare cost.

I’m a 12-year-old activist for the ACLU of Virginia. I want to be an ACLU lawyer when I grow up. When Adams was my age, she wanted to become a surgeon. Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, however, she decided to run for state delegate. When I asked how she handles so many jobs at once, she told me she gets a lot less sleep. Adams’ favorite place to go in Virginia is anywhere with water, so part of her campaign is to keep the James River free from pollution.

Dawn Adams for House of Delegates

Adams believes the ACLU is a critical organization for protecting constitutional rights throughout the nation – the First and Fourteenth  amendments are critical to her. The First, she says, makes America a democracy and allows people to fight back when they believe something is wrong. She strongly supports freedom of speech, religious freedom, and freedom of assembly. Adams also believes the 14th amendment, which prevents most discrimination, hasn’t been expanded widely enough. In her opinion, if people used this amendment to its full potential, America would be a better place.

She says the issue of Confederate monuments is complex, and the mayor was wise to form a committee to discuss it. In her opinion, communities themselves should decide the monuments’ fates. “It’s not a win-win situation,” she explains. I asked for her thoughts on the ACLU defending KKK members’ rights in Charlottesville. She says you can’t deny someone the right to assemble. She wasn’t there, but she knows they had the right to assemble until the moment they became violent.

She also thinks if someone is born in the country, they deserve citizenship. Also, Adams told me that Trump has provided a false meaning of religious liberty. She knows it means anyone can practice any religion, not that one religion can be used to discriminate against other people.

Adams told me the best part of campaigning is talking to people in the community. If she wins she’ll work on quality education and affordable healthcare. She’s part of the LGBTQ community and believes everybody should have equal pay in the workplace.

I asked Adams why she thinks she deserves the community vote. “I have the knowledge, skills, ability, and heart to provide our district the inclusive and decisive leadership we have been lacking for years,” she told me. “I am unafraid to reach across the aisle and vote in the best interest of our citizens.”

She is very kind and cares about the input of her constituents.

When I asked if she had any advice for young people, she said, “You should be the one giving advice, not me. Kids listen to kids.”

At her request, I will give some advice to people my age. Obviously, you can’t vote, and money isn’t exactly abundant in a 12-year-old’s bank account. There are three easy things we can do, though. Firstly, we can host fundraisers. Even the smallest fundraiser can go a long way. Secondly, petitions; whether signing them or creating them, petitions are crucial to our democracy. Lastly, social media. Post to spread the word about the cause.

Dawn Adams with Governor McAuliffe

“The best ways for citizens to empower themselves starts with education,” she said when I asked how the average citizen could resist and fight back. “Understanding that each citizen has the power to change what they do not like in government. Voting far outweighs all others if you’re 18 and eligible – every vote really does count. Be relentless, be polite, be calm, but always persist. Make your leaders aware of your positions and why – be factual, concise, and clear.”

Remember to register to vote by October 16, because voting day is on November 7. Vote to make sure your candidate can become the delegate for the community. Even if you are not in the 68th district, that’s okay, because she supports Ralph Northam for governor and many other Virginian candidates.

Remember, keep calm and elect a nurse practitioner.

*Valley Haggard helped contribute to this piece. Photos from Dawn Adams for VA Delegate 68th District 

Meet the 12-Year-Old Who’s Fighting Against Unlawful Police Surveillance in Richmond

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Henry Haggard began volunteering with the ACLU after an online fight. Bored on a long summer day, the middle schooler was browsing YouTube, looking for videos to challenge his political views. Instead, he found a group of online bullies who responded to his detailed points with cruelty and name-calling.

“They called me autistic,” he tells us when we see him at Constitution Day, an event he organized for the ACLU to celebrate the US Constitution. He didn’t dwell on it. “I realized they would never see my point. I told them I was going to do something a lot bigger than argue on YouTube.”

Henry and guests at Constitution Day

Constitution Day was his second event since the argument and included a guest speaker, ACLU Director of Communications Bill Farrar. Supporters gathered at Richmond Young Writers, which is run by Henry’s mom, Valley, and then listened to Farrar speak on the history of the Constitution and an assortment of contemporary issues.

At the door were Henry’s friends from school, who share his interest in the Constitution and politics. They were collecting emails and petition signatures and selling raffle tickets for ACLU swag.

Constitution Day built on his success with Write For Your Rights, an ACLU-supported letter-writing event which he planned in early August, shortly after the YouTube debate. That event had 40 guests, despite one setback–Facebook found and deleted his profile because Henry was 3 months shy of his 13th birthday.

Before losing his account, Henry created a group on Facebook that has nearly 200 members, called ACLU People Power – Richmond. He’s still active there, via Valley’s Facebook account, and is planning a return under his own identity this October when he turns 13. He uses the group to plan future events and let supporters know about his activism.

To impede Trump's bigoted agenda and demand police accountability and transparency sign Henry's petition at www.tinyurl.com/ccops-hc

Posted by Valley Haggard on Saturday, September 9, 2017

 

His next move was a petition against police surveillance, supporting the Community Control Over Police Surveillance law in his own community of Henrico. It’s an issue he’s spoken about at events and in videos on Facebook, driven by a concern for the privacy rights of minorities in America, who face disproportionate surveillance.

He’s already run for office and won, serving as the student council treasurer at his middle school, and his career ambitions have shifted. “I wanted to be an aerospace engineer for NASA, but now I want to be a lawyer for the ACLU,” he told us, mentioning that his interests run from science to skateboards to law.

Between attending and organizing events, he’s also met with Democratic candidates like Dawn Adams, hoping to build support for the CCOPS law he advocates for, and is writing a series of blog posts for the ACLU. To learn more or volunteer with him, you can join his Facebook group, ACLU People Power – Richmond.

*Photos by Allison MacEwen, cover photo by Valley Haggard

 

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