I want to thank everybody for attending this community event to advocate for medical marijuana
patient rights in Washington State.
The theme this afternoon is safe, affordable access for medical marijuana patients in Washington
State.
That might not mean the same thing to everybody, but all of our speakers today agree that patients
will not be served by all of the recommendations that have been offered by the Washington State
liquor control work group.
It's not a simple thing to undo decades, almost a century of unjust, illogical drug policy.
And we're not miracle workers, but it's been a year since the implementation of I-502,
and we're hoping that we can find some common ground on this issue of patients' rights.
Next I'm going to bring up Alex Cooley from Solstice and chair of the CCSE.
Please give a warm hand.
I want to speak to you today about some of the steps forward and what we're dealing with
in regards to medical cannabis, not necessarily what I-502 brings to the state.
My biggest concerns at this point in time are reliable, safe access, as well as patient
cultivation.
My biggest concerns are the proposed recommendations, as it is for many persons.
First and foremost, for myself as a cultivator, as a business person, as well as a patient,
my biggest concerns are with the recommendations of growth and possession.
As described, it is to be six plants, three mature, three immature, and I am very much
so about the math, and possession's amounts of three ounces does not equate to an appropriate
60-day supply.
As a perpetual cultivator, I know that with three flowering plants at one time, you can
harvest three flowering plants in two months, which is a standard cycle, which will only
yield a patient nine ounces in their 60-day period, which is a very far cry from what
is currently allowed being 24 ounces, which some persons may even say is inappropriate
and even low if you juice or you use infused products.
What is even more of an egregious recommendation, given some people don't know how to do math
and they don't know cultivation, and I understand that, is the taxes.
These recommendations are to create a robust and regulated system, which I have been a
proponent of my entire career.
If we create a robust parallel or singular system, why is it we must tax patients with
three tiers of 25% excise?
It is completely inappropriate.
Again, goes back to the inability to do math.
You can back out taxes.
You can make sure that patients are not paying tax, as it is with any pharmaceutical or recommended
drug by a physician.
I am prescribed Echinacea, other herbal drugs from Bastyr Center for Natural Health.
I pay no taxes.
It should be the same for medical cannabis.
If we're truly going to treat this like a medicine, we should treat it like a medicine,
and that is no taxes.
I have been a huge proponent of taxes.
My career, I pay city, state, federal, every single tax I can pay just to make myself more
legitimate.
But we are in an era of legitimacy for the cannabis plant, so let's treat it legitimately
if it is a medicine, which is no tax.
The other is something that I have been dealing with, with the Liquor Control Board on I-502
in general, but also understanding moving forward for transition, is that we have no
appropriate way to transition current effective providers into whatever system may be regulated.
There's a reason why Colorado allows medical persons first.
So we need to understand a better transition program for current providers.
The last is the next steps.
There will be legislation based on these recommendations.
It is our responsibility to put forth opposing regulation and opposing legislation in order
to get an appropriately regulated system for medical cannabis patients, ones that they
have truly deserved for such a long period of time and we came so close to having in
2011.
I thank all of you for all of your hard work, and I look forward to working with you in
the coming legislative session and the coming years.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Vivian.
I love that you had the idea to bring all these people together today.
I will apologize in advance.
I'm going to have to leave in a few minutes.
My mother is at Virginia Mason, one block from here, and we don't know if she's going
to come out of the hospital alive, so I'm heading back there, but she's lived a very
long and very good life.
She's also had intractable pain very severely for many, many years, but I could not get
past the stigma of using medical marijuana, so has not.
I'm hoping that what we are able to achieve in this state will ensure that no one has
to make that decision because there will be no more stigma for using medical marijuana.
That's a process, but I am amazed at how far we've come.
I started working on this issue with Joanna McKee in 1995.
I have had bills almost every year since then and have tried very, very hard to ensure that
legitimate, qualifying patients have access to a safe, reliable, secure source of their
medicine, and that's what has been behind everything that I have done.
I do know, however, that there is a lot of division in the medical marijuana communities,
and I'm asking people to really do, as Ben mentioned, to come together and not make assumptions
that people are evil or do not have the best interest of patients at heart when they have
maybe some different ideas about what the best approach is.
As a public policymaker, I have to also look at what's politically possible and make all
the advances we can, but to be realistic about it, we have a 60-day, very short legislative
session coming up.
There will be a wide array of bills, I am sure, starting off with repealing all the
medical marijuana statute because people don't need that anymore because of I-502 stores.
Now, I don't agree with that.
I will be introducing legislation.
I'm still working on it, but I do appreciate the recommendations for the most part that
the Liquor Control Board came up with, not all of them, and I will have some differences
in my legislation.
I am pleased that they have now decided that home grows will be okay.
I will have that in my legislation.
I also believe, though, that we should have some group grows, smaller than exists now,
but some small group grows.
You will hear later on from Ryan Day, who is the father of a five-year-old little boy
who has epileptic seizures.
They have been able to find relief from his little son through marijuana usage rather
than through prescribed medication.
I want to do everything I can to make sure that his little boy is able to get the medication
that benefits him.
Now, he may not, I'm not sure, may not want to home grow.
Many parents do not when there are children at home, so they do need a designated provider.
They can benefit from small group grows because so much experimentation has taken place and
will continue to take place to come up with the right therapeutic amounts for these patients.
Some patients will want to go to the I-502 stores.
They'll like the convenience.
They'll like the quality control assurance.
But I think what we need to do is have some of an endorsement or certification on those
I-502 stores that do choose to provide the strains and variety of medical marijuana for
their, for the individuals who come in.
And I think there should be a trained staff on board.
And I do think as well that we need to address the issues of distance from schools and places
and playgrounds and other areas.
It's not realistic in the city of Seattle to only have 21 I-502 stores.
And I'm looking at pursuing having medical only I-502 stores be allowed and have extra
amounts or extra stores, additional stores for those medical only ones based on need
in the local jurisdiction.
And these would not have markings or signage.
And I would like them to be able to be closer than 1,000 feet as one travels around freeways
and around blocks, not as the crow flies.
Based on the federal sentencing guidelines, rules that allow for, that do not allow for
medical marijuana or any such drug from schools and playgrounds, but not transit stations
and other areas that are included in I-502.
We'd have to get a federal waiver for that.
I also believe that patients should have arrest protection as well as an affirmative defense
retention.
Arrest defense, arrest protection if they are able to have their medical health professional
place their name on, not in a registry, we're working that out, but with the State Department
of Health where a patient authorization card would be provided to the patient, to the designated
provider, which would allow that home growing to take place, which would allow a complete
tax exemption from the excise tax at the I-502 stores, and which would allow full arrest
protection.
So these are some of the things that I am looking at.
I appreciate all of the assistance that so many of you have provided to me.
And just in closing again, let's keep our eye on what we can gain and what we can do
in preserving the rights that we have now for patients.
Let's not attack people for bringing up some ideas that may be a little different than
what you might think is appropriate, or we could end up with nothing.
Thank you very much.
Let's never, ever lose sight of what the enemy is, and that's prohibition.
And let me just tell you how prohibition can, I promise you, in a very short order, raise
its ugly head again.
First of all, if you're waiting for Congress to act to modify the Controlled Substances
Act to reschedule marijuana, you're going to be waiting a long, long time.
They can't even balance the budget.
How is it going to happen?
It may happen here in Washington State.
We already have some cities, unlike Seattle, that have said we want to ban not only 502
facilities but medical marijuana facilities.
The city of Kent, the city of Yakima, Pierce County.
And how about right here in King County?
The NIMBYs were out in force, and they got the King County Council to say no processing
plant in Redmond Ridge.
That happened here in King County.
And so if you want to spend time wondering who the enemy is, it's prohibition.
It's losing the battle that we have won so far and recognizing that it's not over.
What I want you to do is to think about how I-502 can be imperiled by division within
the community and how the proponents of prohibition are clamoring for that division to stay alive
and to keep fighting.
They want you to fight with each other.
They want to be able to reassert prohibition.
They want 502 to fail.
You have a wonderful leader in Senator Jeanne Colwell's.
502 is perfectly consistent with a separate licensing system for medical marijuana.
Whatever remedies are fashioned in the legislature, work with your legislators.
Work with Senator Colwell's.
The city of Seattle has said very clearly, we simply want a state license.
It doesn't have to be a 502 license.
It can be a state license that's for medical marijuana.
But in the meantime, I want to close with this, and I appreciate that the speakers were
all asked to be pretty short and to the point, because it is so critically important that
everyone remember the enemy is prohibition, and what we should be doing is going at that
enemy on the united fronts.
And so if the medical community can at the same time work with the legislature to see
what kinds of licensing and regulations would be appropriate for the medical marijuana industry,
at the same time, all of you authorized users, everyone that is a designated provider, look
at a 502 license.
We need to get medical facilities licensed to.
502 is perfectly compatible with a dedicated marijuana supply system.
Look into that.
Look into your options.
Don't be shut out.
We have asked the city of Seattle has asked that the Liquor Control Board give medical
marijuana preference in licensing.
We know that they have far too few licenses designated across the state and especially
in the city of Seattle.
We're going to continue fighting to make sure that we meet both recreational and medical
demand.
But it is so important that no one in this room leave thinking that prohibition is a
thing of the past.
It is clamoring to come back.
It is looking for division in the community.
And unless we all pull together, they will get their wish.
They will get the wish in the new year.
So let's all pull together.
Let's recognize the new freedoms that we've struck.
And thank you for all of your efforts, all of the work that has been built upon all of
your decades, your decades of activism.
And let's not stop now.
Thanks.
Hello.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Please give me some patience with my crippled voice.
I was in a motorcycle crash 26 years ago.
And I didn't know why that happened.
A lot of people told me that God saved me for a reason.
And I didn't know what that reason was for about 10 years.
But about 10 years after that, I was arrested for growing medical marijuana in my home.
And I realized what my life mission was.
I've had no choice.
I need medical marijuana to survive and to be a functioning human being.
And we all know the value of medical marijuana.
But I've been living this for a long time.
I was first arrested for growing in 1996.
I went through two years of legal battles and the first medical necessity trial in Seattle.
And in 1997, after I proved the value of medical marijuana in court, they still wanted to put
me in jail for 90 days.
Okay?
But I was freed.
I was freed by public outcry.
That is a very important lesson that we should all remember.
We have the power, the power of the people, the power of the voice.
Stand up for your rights.
This is the time.
It's a very important lesson.
As Al Gore pointed out, the Chinese word for crisis also means opportunity.
It's another big lesson we've got to remember.
My doctor filed the Medical Use Act of 1998.
I founded the Lifevine Collective in 1999.
And we've been having patients helping patients ever since.
Some of you may know my friend Elena.
She built websites.
She helped me manage Lifevine in recent years.
We didn't know why she was so sick until she was diagnosed with cancer last year.
We had a lot of marijuana plants growing in our house because patients need a lot of medicine,
especially to fight cancer.
The government does not want us to know that cannabis fights cancer.
Earlier this year, the National Institute for Health released a paper on their website
that noted several studies that demonstrate how cannabis fights tumor development.
That paper was quickly edited to say that cannabis provides only symptomatic relief
for cannabis patients.
But you can still find references to the science for medical marijuana at cannabismedicaldictionary.com.
There's a lot of research out there.
Making oils and other concentrated cannabis medicines requires a lot more marijuana than
most people understand.
We had the same amount, 134 plants, at Elena's house last year.
Police raided her home the day before Thanksgiving.
They stole almost all of our medicine.
They tried to charge me for that, but they had to give up because I had a strong attorney.
However, they did not return the medicine.
This loss.
Elena has been suffering without the medicine that might have saved her life for more than
a year.
She is really dying now.
She stopped eating last week.
You will probably not see Christmas.
She might have been saved, but the police destroyed her garden.
I've spent huge amounts of money trying to give her the medicine that might help her,
but it's not been enough.
This is not a political campaign.
This movement for medical cannabis is about life and death.
I have one more thing to say.
The Life Fine motto has been Patience, helping patients since before it was legal.
The Life Fine collective is not going to shut down, no matter what the law says.
Thank you all for coming.
Please make a phone call.
Thanks.
Thank you to everybody for being here, no matter what your position is, no matter what
you think of me.
I'm going to take just a minute.
For those of you who are newer faces, younger people, you probably don't realize that I'm
probably older than a lot of you here.
I want to give you a little bit of my background personally.
A lot of you have never met me.
You've never talked to me.
You've heard a lot about me from other people, but you don't actually know what's true.
I started defending medical marijuana patients back in 1995 when I went to work for Jeff
Steinborn.
I was a little shocked to see Martin Martinez say in the Seattle PI last month that Jeff
was the one who defended him when actually it was me, Martin, who took your case to trial.
It was me who got, thank you, who got at least eight of the 12 people.
We didn't get them all, but we got eight of the 12 people to agree that his 88 plants
that he was growing in his home were for his own personal use.
I have represented providers who were threatened with federal prosecution if they didn't plead
guilty to felony charges in state court.
Those providers had to plead guilty on the day that their patient died because the patient's
cannabis had been cut off.
I have represented patients, providers, and commercial growers, smugglers from Canada,
dealers, users.
I was representing people charged with marijuana crimes, people who had their assets taken
from the government for over a decade before going to work for the ACLU.
I know what compassion looks like, but I also have a bullsh-t meter that has been finely
honed by representing all the people that I represent in the cannabis community.
So that's where I'm coming from.
And I also have a really strong record of being an effective advocate.
You may hate me, but you can't ignore that when I started working with Senator Jeanne
Colwell in 2007, we were able to start getting medical marijuana legislation passed in the
legislature.
I served on the I-75 panel, and I was actually able to sit down one-on-one with our former
Seattle City Attorney Tom Carr and get a consensus report published that all 11 members of the
panel agreed to, which said, hey, the sky didn't fall.
And then of course there's 502.
So I tell you all that not to say believe what I say or agree with what I say, but to
at least acknowledge I know a little something about being an effective advocate.
And I'm here, honestly, to give you my take on what you need to be thinking about if you
want to be as effective as possible going into the 2014 session to talk about medical
cannabis.
The volunteers from NORML did me a huge favor and said they would pass out materials.
I brought materials for you today because my comments need to be very short.
And those materials are a couple of things that I think it's important for you to say.
First of all, it's the actual backgrounder from the I-502 that says what we said about
the medical marijuana law during the campaign.
It was in writing.
It's still on the website.
I want you to have that so you can see what we were actually saying.
The second thing that is in there is what we actually said, what the ACLU of Washington
actually said to the Liquor Control Board about its draft recommendations, which is
first and foremost, protect what Initiative 692 protected, which is patients growing for
themselves and being able to defend themselves in court no matter how much marijuana they
possess.
Those are the two core protections that our medical marijuana law actually delivered.
And in that letter, it's a long seven-page letter, you will see the actual history of
the evolution of our medical marijuana law and what is actually legal now and what's
not.
The third thing that's in there is the actual final draft recommendations from the Liquor
Control Board.
That's available online, but I wanted to make sure that you saw what the final recommendations
from the Liquor Control Board were to the legislature.
And finally, there's a one-pager on the top that are my suggestions for what you ought
to be doing when you're thinking about talking about medical marijuana to legislators and
other policymakers in the upcoming session.
First and foremost, focus on the basic patient rights.
Those are the rights to grow for oneself so that you can grow whatever strains you want
or to designate a provider to grow for you.
Focus on that.
Patients need to be able to grow their own medicine.
And second, they need to be able to defend themselves in court regardless of how much
marijuana they possess.
That is what our medical marijuana allows at its core.
Second, recognize that engaging in commercial activity is very different from protecting
patient rights.
That is the key.
I want to tell all of you right now that if you think the debate in the upcoming session
is about medical versus recreational, you are missing the boat.
What the debate is about is whether or not people are going to continue to be allowed
to engage in commercial activity with no license, no regulation.
And yes, they want to know whether or not you should be able to be required to pay taxes.
That's going to be part of the conversation because guess what?
If you're in business, that is part of the conversation.
No matter what your business is.
Third, think through what is really different about cannabis that's intended primarily for
medical use and cannabis that's intended primarily for non-medical use.
Think about what those differences actually are and whether or not those differences require
laws to explain that difference or if it's really a matter of public education and marketing.
For an example, if I'm drinking a glass of red wine every day for my heart health, is
the wine any different if I'm drinking it because it makes my lasagna taste better?
Those are the questions that people that aren't in the medical cannabis community have.
What's the difference between the two?
So focus on that and be able to explain that and articulate that.
Also, a lot of you aren't understanding that if your cannabis product has less than three
tenths of one percent THC in it, it's not defined as marijuana under our Washington
state law anymore.
What that means is you can sell those products anywhere but an I-502 store.
So if you've got your high CBD products that don't have THC in them, then why aren't you
talking to your neighborhood co-op, herbalist, homeopathic store, your gas station?
They can be sold anywhere.
An outfitter is selling products that have cannabis in them that has no THC.
You could be doing that now.
If you're worried about, I know, talk to your lawyer, maybe they don't get it.
If you're worried about the prices, and that's a lot of what I hear, here's a few things
and you'll get this in the fact sheet and I'm happy to email the fact sheet to anybody.
Understand that the tax is not 75 percent.
It winds up with even retail sales tax being included as about 30 to 40 percent of the
total tax.
So understand that piece.
Also, understand and acknowledge that current prices still include a prohibition risk premium.
They're still higher than they're going to be in a legal competitive market.
And if you really care about patients, focus on what is going to be the price that patients
are going to pay, with or without the tax.
If you want to argue tax exemption, like Alex said, that's great, but you better explain
to legislators that that tax exemption is going to benefit the patients and not you.
In other words, your prices are going to be 30 to 40 percent cheaper than the 502 prices.
Otherwise, my bullsh-t meter goes off and I say, you just want to pocket the tax that
everyone else has to pay.
All right?
Finally, do, and I think this is, hopefully this is coming through in all of my remarks,
do yourself a favor when you're talking to lawmakers and don't try to play the victim.
I have heard frequently it wasn't our fault that the governor vetoed Senate Bill 5073
and we don't have regulation of dispensaries.
You're right.
It wasn't your fault.
However, you're responsible for opening a dispensary after the veto.
It was a known risk.
You decided to go into business despite the fact that the governor vetoed the licensing
and regulation of that business.
In fact, Senator Cole Wells introduced a bill 10 days after the veto that would have limited
collective gardens to one per parcel and would have made it so that this collective garden
safe access point business would clearly not have been legal.
Nobody thought that collective gardens were supposed to replace dispensaries.
Just acknowledge you made the decision you wanted to go into business.
Now you need to have a conversation as a professional, totally separate from patients need to be
able to grow for themselves.
But keep that distinction in mind.
There's business and there's compassion.
In a good setting, they match up, but you need to be clear that it is two different
things that you're talking about.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
Quick background, Los Angeles County paramedic, bachelor's degree in cell and molecular biology,
naturopathic doctorate degree from Bastyr, post-doctorate in functional medicine, and
I've been practicing functional naturopathic endocrinology for seven years in Seattle.
I really only rattle off all that educational background, one, to lend credibility, but
two, to let you know that with all that education, it wasn't until 2011 that I even understood
anything medicinally about cannabis.
I had no recreational perspective.
I was not trained at Bastyr in cannabis.
My board exams did not include cannabis, sativa or indica, although 150 other herbs, and I'm
not a medical patient.
The seed was planted in 2010 when naturopathic physicians were able to be practitioners added
to the list of being able to authorize for the use of medicinal cannabis.
This was actually during the busiest time of my practice, and I didn't even consider
it for about a year and a half.
And then in 2011, I was given the opportunity to work at a clinic doing patient authorizations.
It was at that time that I jumped in 100%.
It was only two weeks of hearing the stories of patients that I knew this was something
big, something much larger than myself.
I needed to understand this plant completely.
I took on hundreds of hours of self-study.
I studied thick biochemical books of cannabis.
I scoured the medical literature.
I listened to lectures of prominent physicians and researchers about cannabis.
I gave each and every patient in the room my best, 20 to 40 minutes in the room.
I sifted through files, and I'm not kidding, file boxes of medical files, four to five
inches thick of medical records.
I'd offer two to five other treatments in the room other than cannabis based on the
condition that they came to me for.
I stuck to the list of qualifiable conditions, even though as a doctor, I truly believe that
list falls short in our state of Washington.
I've seen patients from the age of 18 to 92 comforting them as they cry both in pain and
in desperation, not wanting to get high, but just wanting relief.
Many have never even tried cannabis recreationally.
Real bound patients, double prosthetic limbs, IED blasts, severe motor vehicle accidents,
broken backs, farming accidents, bodies with more pens, rods, and screws than I care to
mention, seizures, cancer, cancer, cancer.
I documented each patient's journey meticulously in the medical record.
It's the very least that I could do.
And most importantly, I documented your words.
Cannabis has saved my life.
I can't wait to tell you how much better I'm doing this year as they return beaming for
a follow-up appointment.
I'm back to work after two years of my wife being a sole provider, and I've lost 80 pounds.
Yes, I hardly recognize you.
I'm leaving the house again after being housebound for years.
I'm off blank pharmaceutical drugs this year.
I can tell you that it's usually two to five.
This has been documented, documented, documented.
My advanced stage prostate cancer is 98% gone.
My urologist has never seen anything like it.
This was 40% CBD oil.
Thank you for those who are making this miraculous medicine.
I just want to end with a few statements and opinions.
I believe recreational users are a completely different group from medical patients.
We need to maintain a safe and separate system that doesn't hurt anyone.
The sign says it all.
Patients need affordable, tested, pure, free of contaminants medicine.
I consider the doctor-patient relationship sacred.
What goes on in the room is between us.
In my opinion, we need to retain collective gardens and home grows.
We need to allow people to be compassionate caregivers.
People should be allowed to help people.
This is our fundamental need as human beings.
I'm living proof that cannabis heals.
I'm standing up here today.
I look healthy because I use cannabis.
You can't see the metal plate that runs the length of my left leg that's holding my knee
together.
You can't see the nausea and vomiting that has caused me to lose 60 pounds in the last
year.
You can't see the insomnia that kept me up until 3 in the morning.
Cannabis is what keeps me moving, active, and functional.
You heard Senator Cole Wells tell you about what's waiting for us in Olympia.
Allison Holcomb confirmed that.
They are looking to repeal our medical marijuana law potentially.
It's not enough to say hell no and to say that we don't like it.
We have to be able to clearly articulate what it is that we want from them.
So I've gone around the state and I've been talking to stakeholders and I've been talking
to a lot of you in this room to find out where our common ground is.
We all want home grows.
We all want cooperative cultivation.
And we all believe that the affirmative defense, the cornerstone of our law that was passed
in 1998, must stay in place no matter what.
There shouldn't be any restrictions on the doctor patient relationship.
Doctors need flexibility to modify their treatment plans based on their one-on-one relationships
with individual patients.
And we need civil protections just like any other prescription medication.
Protections for organ transplants, protection for housing and employment, protections from
court supervision, and PTSD needs to be added to the list.
We don't need a registry.
Cannabis is legal in this state.
If you don't have to register to buy your marijuana from a store recreationally, then
why would a patient have to register?
And we do not tax medicine in this state.
Just last week, cannabis was added to the American Herbal Pharmacopeia as an official
botanical medicine.
Just thanks to the work of our partners at Americans for Safe Access.
And you know, it mirrors an exemption that we already have in law in this state, which
says that any medicine, animal, botanical or mineral, that is recommended by a doctor,
should not be taxed.
Sales, use or excise.
Cannabis is no different.
And lastly, we want a licensing and regulatory framework just like 502.
Our commercial businesses need some protection.
They want licenses and they want regulations.
80 of them in this state are paying taxes not because the law says they have to, because
they want to.
They deserve to have a licensing and regulatory framework.
There's 300 of these businesses right here in the city of Seattle.
And if we fold them all into 502, that's 300 businesses that aren't going to exist.
I want you to think about all the commercial real estate that's currently occupied by cannabis
businesses and imagine it vacant.
That's what the legislature wants to do by forcing us into the 502 system.
502 stores won't work for us.
They don't exist.
And when they do, they aren't going to have the products that we need.
And certainly they're not going to be at the prices we can afford.
But we can't afford to wait for the 502 stores to open and then fix this problem.
The federal government has said that our medical marijuana program is untenable in light of
the new coal memo that was issued.
So while the rest of the states were talking about the coal memo giving us a green light
to move forward with commercial production, our U.S. attorneys here in Washington said
that that was an excuse to wipe out our medical marijuana program.
And the cities and counties have said if the feds don't do it, they will.
The city of Seattle has said you need a medical marijuana license by January 1st, 2015.
That license does not exist right now.
If we do not provide a regulatory framework for people to get those licenses, there will
not be any access points in the city of Seattle.
And that's why the legislature is taking action on this.
And they are taking action.
They didn't ask three state agencies to make recommendations so they could ignore those
recommendations.
They asked for recommendations because they're going to pass a law this year.
So we better be able to, again, clearly articulate what it is we want from them and what it is
that's wrong with what they're trying to do to us.
Obviously freedom isn't free.
We all have to fight for it.
The Health Before Happy Hour campaign is a way for all of you to easily plug in and take
action.
It's already backed up by people like Americans for Safe Access, the Center for the Study
of Cannabis and Social Policy, Coalition for Cannabis Standards and Ethics, and many, many
others.
And the vast majority of this community have said we cannot wait until 2015 for legislation.
We want it now, in January.
So if you want to learn more about that, you can go to healthbeforehappyhour.org.
There's also flyers that are being handed out.
They're at the tables at the front, and Melissa Heisman has them back there.
And lastly, join us at our fundraiser immediately following this event where you can also learn
more.
I brought with me today a plant ally.
This is my tea tree oil, and I'm treating a fungus on my fingernail with it.
I brought another plant ally because I heard that there's a horrible something or other
going around up here in Seattle, and I'm living in San Diego now.
I didn't want to get sick.
And so this is called Stamets 7 Immune Support.
It's made with mushrooms.
Are we here today for any of these plants?
No.
Why not?
It's a great question, because cannabis is a botanical medicine.
And like Carrie just said, I was a liaison for Americans for Safe Access and worked with
Roy Upton on producing the cannabis monograph, which has been adopted by the state of Washington.
Looks like it's going to be adopted also by the state of Oregon to guide quality assurance
and quality control.
And what this has been is an effort to bring cannabis in as a botanical medicine.
The botanical industry has worked a long time towards self-regulation, and this document
is one of several that's being used to help the rest of the industry learn how to self-regulate.
What I really wanted to say is that I'm here today because of a woman who walked into my
office debilitating pain her entire life.
She was making her own wine, is what she told me, drinking a bottle a day.
She had agoraphobia, could hardly leave her house.
I wrote her a cannabis recommendation, thanks to Senator Cole Wells, that she expanded the
providers who could recommend cannabis to patients.
This woman overcame a level of her agoraphobia, and she quit drinking a bottle a day of homemade
wine, and I consider that significant impact on her health and quality of life.
I'm here for another patient that was on about five or six different pain medications.
She hadn't left her bed since giving birth a number of years previously, couldn't care
for her family at all, quit cold turkey, these medications, started using cannabis, and is
a fully functioning adult out of bed every morning, bouncing out of bed at 7 o'clock,
running her household.
I'm here because of a woman debilitated by multiple sclerosis and thereby addicted to
benzodiazepines, and if anybody knows anything about benzodiazepine withdrawal, it's horrible.
She's been able to significantly come off of that drug and onto a cannabis variety and
live a more normal life than she had before.
And finally, I'm here today because I've been the doctor to children, pediatric patients.
This is what breaks my heart the most.
As a doctor, I always thought I wanted to care for suffering people.
And it's painful to watch people suffer and to watch your patients suffer.
There are children that it's been stated, and we have a parent here today, that have
been suffering from debilitating seizure disorders that cannabidiol-rich variety is helping.
There are oncology pediatric patients that have a five-year-old patient.
He's not directly in my care, but I've been in communication with his father.
And this is what his father said.
After administering my child so much poison, I can't explain how it feels knowing that
I'm giving him something that's good for him.
So we can't always clinically measure the effects of cannabis on somebody's life.
What it means for some of these parents is that they sleep through the night for the
first time in years.
We don't value quality of life enough and the potential for this plant and many others
to bring quality of life to human beings.
So what all these patients have in common, and with many of you here in this room, is
that they're not black marketeers.
They're not gray marketeers.
They're not marketeers at all.
They're patients.
And I agree with Alison Holcomb that the movement has largely piggybacked onto the medical patients
movement.
And now is not the time to throw these patients under the bus.
So I-502 has confirmed what?
That cannabis is for everybody, right?
Anybody over the age of 21 or age of 21 and up can walk in a store and buy it.
Is it really congruent to say that if you want to use it as a medicine, you have to
go jump through a bunch of hurdles and live under a police state with your name on a registry?
As a doctor, I see an incongruency there.
I also see an incongruency that the money collected is going to go for studying it as
a drug of addiction, which is the same stigma that's been imposed upon us by the federal
government.
It's time that we're able to study this as a therapeutic compound for our patients.
Right on.
So at the Center for the Study of Cannabis and Social Policy, we're looking at ways to
implement an IRB, which is what you have to do to have a valid human clinical study.
We're interested in the natural history of people using the natural plant and what's
available to them in their own locality, just like we use many other plants.
So we're all navigating these turbulent waters together.
And I've just learned to surf since I've moved to San Diego.
And sometimes you have a Northwest well interfacing with the Southwest well.
And I'll tell you what, it's not easy to catch a ride on those waves.
But we're on a wave and we've got to catch a ride.
Washington has got to be a light here.
And I think we've got the beginnings of it.
Maybe there's a long tunnel to go through.
But some of us are not the garden and some of us the weed.
We're all a weed here.
We're all here for a plant called cannabis and it's a weed.
And anybody should be able to grow weed in their backyard.
And in closing, I just wanted to, this Tom Waits lyric that I liked, it says, pin your
ear to the wisdom post, pin your eye to the line, never let the weeds get higher than
the garden and always keep a sapphire, always keep a diamond in your mind.
Washington State Liquor Control Board wants to kill medical marijuana.
This isn't thinly veiled contempt.
They clearly want to put an end to it.
And the new proposals are essentially making medical marijuana small enough so that they
can drown it in a bathtub of three inches of water.
And so what are we going to do?
You have several different people coming up here.
Each one has their own proposal.
If you are looking for somebody on this stage to fix this problem, you have made a huge
mistake.
You are the community.
You are the people that are going to stop this.
If you do not rise to this occasion, then it will fail.
They only have one person to listen to right now, Washington State Liquor Control Board.
That is it.
That's the only proposal on the table.
Other people are coming up with other proposals.
If you want to join them, fine.
The truth is that as activists, we live in absolute truths.
That means it's difficult for us to step out of our own shoes and look at the view of other
people and try and incorporate those views to come to a conclusion.
That's fine with me.
That's fine.
But do something.
If you guys do not pick up the phone and call your legislators this session, one person
represents about 100 people.
100 people represents 1,000, so on and so on.
If you do not pick up your phone and call your legislator this session, you're failing.
You're failing.
If you expect us to do it, this is only about 20, 25 people coming up to talk.
It's not enough.
It has to be all of you.
I always, every opportunity I get where I speak publicly, I like to have everybody hold
up their telephone.
So if you brought your cell phone, and I know there's more cell phones than people in here,
so hold up your cell phone for me.
All right.
Good.
That's enough people to make me happy.
Now you can type in this number.
Ready?
360-902, I'll go slow for those of you medicated.
360-902-4111.
Did you guys get that?
That's the governor's office.
You guys give him a call.
I can't give you his private cell, but please feel free to give him a call too.
He's not in today, so wait till Monday.
Make sure he hears from you guys.
Let him know.
Again, you guys represent the people that put him in office.
And when you talk to your legislative assistants and you talk to your legislators, you remind
them that medical marijuana, it pulls better than recreational marijuana, and it pulls
better than Republicans, and it pulls better than Democrats.
There have been a couple of people who have made reference to me so far today.
My name is Ryan Day.
I'm not really significant in and of myself.
The only reason I'm here is because of my son Hayden.
Hayden is five years old.
He has Dravet syndrome.
It's a very rare and catastrophic form of epilepsy.
And on a normal day, Hayden has over 100 seizures a day.
We sit and we watch as he slowly has seizure after seizure after seizure and jerks himself
to the ground.
You know, we've been lucky so far that we haven't had to put him in a helmet, although
we've had that suggestion made.
I'm really lucky to be here to be able to tell you that about two and a half months
ago, we started Hayden on CBD.
We use a CBD extract from medical marijuana, and it has been miraculous.
Hayden, on most days now, doesn't have any seizures that we can see.
One that we can detect.
Hayden had been developmentally stuck at about two years old for the last three years.
He just turned five last month.
Hayden is starting to develop again.
He is starting to make connections.
He is starting to use new words.
He is starting to put words together.
My son is coming out of his epileptic haze.
And it's just been an amazing thing to see.
And we started this, and I got my growing tent set up because there's no way we can
afford this to buy at even dispensary prices.
The fact of the matter is, Hayden requires about an ounce a week in medicine, and at
roughly $300 an ounce, it's over $10,000 a year that it would cost our family.
You hear about families with medical insurance going bankrupt.
That's a family like ours.
We max out our copay every year, and we max it out on the credit card.
So we need to grow.
And I started growing, and suddenly I saw that the Liquor Control Board was threatening
to take away that right to home grow.
The only way that I could do this, I don't know how many of you are parents out there,
but the fact of the matter is, legal or illegal, I'm going to do what I have to for my son.
And that's very scary.
And that's a decision that I hope I won't have to make.
And I hope that our legislators will hear from patients like everybody here and stakeholders
and say, we need to make sure that we have a reasonable policy in place.
But I want to tell you also that I'm new to this entire culture.
I've never done drugs in my life.
I was a U.S. Marine.
I was considered pretty ultra conservative in a lot of circles.
But I'm here because I believe in this, and I believe that what you are all fighting for
is right.
But I also want to tell you that you need to really stop and think about how you're
viewed by the other side.
We need to work with them.
We are a minority.
We are not in the majority.
And if people look at us as the tea party of medical marijuana, we're going to lose.
Period.
I actually work as a lobbyist and an advocacy professional.
This is what I do for a living.
And I'm telling you, we need to be reasonable.
We do need to compromise sometimes.
Not all the way, but we need to compromise sometimes.
And we need to make sure that people don't see us as crazies that can be written off,
that they see us as patients, they see us as caregivers, they see us as people who care.
I want to tell you that Alex Cooley, who spoke here earlier, this man cares.
He donates medicine to all sorts of people.
My grow isn't started yet.
But Alex donated medicine to my son so that we could start him on CBD and we would not
lose another day to seizures.
And he's not the only one.
Dax at New Leaf, who's the maker of Dama oil, has donated medicine to dozens of families
whose children have Dravet syndrome.
There is a vibrant medical community of producers and processors and people who care.
They're not growing marijuana and selling it to get rich.
They're growing marijuana and selling it so they can afford to help people.
And it's important that we don't lose them.
We don't lose that community.
Because when they go away, if they go away, all we're going to be left with, those are
for-profit retail stores where it's only about turning the product and they're not going
to care if they carry the product that's right for a little boy with seizures.
They're going to carry a product that's going to turn the fastest and make them the most
money.
So I just hope that we can all work together.
And you've heard people talk about unity and you've also heard people bashing each other
up here.
And you bash each other, you're weakening us, and we're going to lose.
There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
We will.
So let's try.
For little boys like my son Hayden, and for all the patients who are here who cannabis
is saving their life because if we don't work together, we're all going to lose.
Thank you.
What will happen when we can provide cannabis in a quantifiable, highly bioavailable form
with little to no toxicity issues?
When we accomplish that, the federal government will listen to what we have to say because
we're speaking their language, the language of science.
We face a myriad of challenges in our pursuit of answers, the greatest challenge being the
current legal suppression of research along with the social stigma attached to the psychoactive
effects of THC.
Our team at Cannabis Biosciences has been working to overcome the current limitations
associated with the delivery of essential cannabinoids to the body, specifically providing
antioxidants in the form the body recognizes at a highly bioavailable level.
Low bioavailability in antioxidants produced in cannabis was a major obstacle to overcome.
We surpassed this obstacle by utilizing revolutionary, patented technologies in our extraction process.
This extraordinary science enables us to extract antioxidants found in cannabis in the nanoparticle
size.
When we can provide antioxidants in a nanoparticle form, it dramatically increases the scavenging
of free radicals while decreasing the necessary dose required to be affected by many times
the currently available products on the market, thus creating medicines that are smaller doses
while being more effective at an affordable price for the public.
The opportunity to deliver free radical scavenging is improved by nanoparticle antioxidants,
giving us the ability to address debilitating illnesses such as cancer, viruses, and disorders.
So when you pose the question to the Cannabis Bioscience team, is there room in Washington
State for social and medicinal marijuana, we pose the question back, is there room for
a stable, quantifiable botanical drug that meets FDA criteria in the state of Washington?
We say yes.
Yes, there is.