Pot Hearings March 29, 2017

Why I don’t want Pot Shops in our community…Medford or anywhere.

 From my own observation and personal experience there is no upside to the recreational use of Marijuana or Cannabis as they like to call it.

Medical use may be OK with a prescription but as a small business owner in the field of nutrition and epigenetics, I think there are many natural non-addictive treatments for pain and anxiety that traditional medicine is not open to because Big Pharma wants to sell drugs... and the medical community must wait for clinical proof. They do not know much about epigenetics and nutrition.It is not taught in medical school beyond a few hours. I know, my son is a doctor.

I attended the Public Hearing on Pot Shops yesterday and listened to nearly 6 hours of testimony mostly by pot proponents or bureaucrats who see a gravy train they plan to ride at the expense of our children and youth not to mention the elderly and our disabled vets suffering the trauma of injury and stress. I feel many if not most problems I heard about today could be helped or alleviated through better life choices and supplementation.

 I would like to revisit the Marijuana Question as it was not covered well during our brutal presidential campaign season. Obviously most of the Commonwealth is not truly on board the pot train. It is too complex and the law was poorly written and extremely difficult to implement. 
"Although it may have gone somewhat overlooked due to the presidential election, on November 8, 2016, MA voters approved the legalization of recreational marijuana at the ballot box.  The law allows the possession, transfer or use of up to one ounce of marijuana on one's person (the equivalent of about 40 joints/servings) and up to 10 ounces at home.

The law does not create ANY limits or restrictions on the marketing and sale of edible products, including those gummy bears, lollipops, soda or other products that would be particularly appealing to kids and teens. Neither does the law establish any limits on potency, including hash oil extracts that can have a potency approaching 100% THC (the active chemical in marijuana)... "

 Stood while one of their group testified against pot.

 Parents holding pix of loved ones who died from addiction and substance abuse...against pot.

 Pot proponent reprimanded by officer for being a disturbance.

 Hemp is her issue

 Pot grower

 Vet with PTSD got applause for his service.

 Concerned about racism in putting legal restraints on pot use.

Media presence

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Pot Hearing April 3, 2017

 Trans-human who lost partner to AIDS

 LBTQ supports Pot

 Laying out all the stuff he gets provided by the state.

 Rep, Shauna O'Connell

 Reps Lyons and O'Connell

My husband David also testified that day. Here is his testimony...

Sub-human Standards

David Funnell

I was twenty years old when I was introduced to marijuana – I was in my sophomore year at the very exclusive and prestigious Amherst College in early 1967.

Friends coming home to our residential frat house from Spring Break had joined the newly-popular subculture of recreational drug use and started me on a new adventure we universally found fascinating. There were virtually no opponents and at the time it was not strange to me that those of our brothers who chose to abstain, also found it convenient to refrain from criticism.

Now it is 2017 and fifty years have passed I will not refrain from my more mature criticism.

It was of the nature of our “high moral ground” standards learned in the Freshman Year required course in English, that we had been indoctrinated into “values clarification.”

This meant that believers (like me who grew up through the 1950's) in a traditional, American Christian lifestyle would be shamed, by professorial manipulation of peer pressure, to accept the view that we had been raised in an “authoritarian” culture. That culture now stood in need of being judged by the current sociological trends among our teachers to be inferior. It needed to be displaced by relativism, acceptance and rote-learning of the symbols valuing the multicultural  “cool” new world of diversity  and situational ethics.

I say, “rote-learning” of the symbols because our highly-trained analytical skills were being schooled away from the ancient foundations that had formerly given us a firm cohesion between personal choices and the society around us – morality was expendable.

This change of the 1960's included me, with my full participation – my diligent pursuit and enjoyment of the varieties of “experience” made my life a virtual cliché of the times.

When I was working on my Qualifying Exams for my admission to Candidacy for the final phase of my doctoral-degree studies my dependency on marijuana had caught up with me.

While achieving far-above-normal study results and planning an exciting research pattern for my Ph.D. thesis work that would soon gain for me a Fulbright Grant, I was settling for less than I was capable of and my professors told me this. They learned from me about my habit and admonished me to make the best of a second chance to pass the Exams.

Much more could be said but this simple story is told just to point out that a subculture like the one I had voluntarily joined nine years previous to this jarring realization, is one that cannot be used as a building block for a future society in this or in any other country.

Marijuana use and the delusions of self-induced “contact highs” of peer acceptance go together to prompt young and gullible souls to imagine that they are capable of only a very low, and I submit, decidedly sub-human standard of performance.

I urge the committee to impose the strictest of controls on this dangerous substance and to reject the localization of its open commercialization.