Longmont City Council to discuss dispensary BAN TONIGHT

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?ei...032&ref=search

Get your talking points ready EARLY. You get between 3 and 5 minutes depending on how many sign up. Show up early to sign up to speak. If you don't speak up they won't know how many of us there are that need the dispensaries to stay.
Can't make the meeting? Email or call the Longmont City Council.
the below note may get ya started and includes required email addys ready to cut and paste in your program.

Error | Facebook

To Longmont City Council:

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

July 19, 2010


Greetings Mayor Baum and esteemed members of the Longmont City Council,


My name is Breedheen O'Rilley Keefer and I live in Ward 1 of Longmont. I frequently write under the pen name of Breezy Kiefair. In addition to being a writer who was inducted into the National Library of Congress at age 17 in 1997 for poetry, I am an artist, a survivor of an abusive home and the foster care system of the State of Colorado in the 80's and 90's, a patient with severe and debilitating Fibromyalgia with allergy onset in 1979, a patient on the Colorado Medical Marijuana registry since June 2009, and a Medicinal Cannabis activist since January of 2010.


It has come to my attention that the Longmont city council intends to debate whether or not to bad dispensaries in the city of Longmont. While I do not presume to tell you how to do your job, I humbly offer some reasons not to ban dispensaries in Longmont.


If you ban dispensaries in our town, patients will suffer in a number of ways and will be left making some tough choices that could have legal consequences for people who are already sick and or dying. With a ban in place, many patients would have to go to Boulder to get their medication, put their plants in the hands of private caregivers, and possibly be tempted to obtain their medication from the black market.

If forced to go to Boulder, it presents many obstacles for some of the more disabled patients on the registry. Transportation costs incurred to patient could make trips to get medication prohibitively expensive. If a patient is lucky enough to have a car, the ever increasing price of gasoline could make trips to get medication less frequent than are necessary for proper maintenance of medication.

If a patient does not have a car by choice, by financial tier in society, or because of medical incapability of driving then the patient must rely on public transportation, friends, or family to get to the dispensaries in Boulder.

Public Transportation does not look kindly on medication being transported on in their vehicles. One of my spiritual advisers, Rev B. Baker of Green Faith Ministry, intervened when public transportation would not transport a blind and disabled person to/from dispensary for the purpose of obtaining medication. While this particular example didn't happen here in Longmont, I have personally been a victim of this kind of discrimination even when I was carrying no medication on me but a bit of medication odor was lingering on my clothing.

As a person prohibited from having a drivers license due to dangerous seizure activity that would endanger myself and others on the road, I do not like to have to depend on someone else to transport me for something so necessary as my medication. Friends and family have lives and responsibilities of their own, and even with the best of intentions if I am left to depend on Friends and Family for rides into Boulder for my medication, I will likely be left completely without medication on a regular basis. My current caregiver is 3 blocks from where I live. Even with my movement disorder, I can still walk there and back even in a good deal of pain.

If forced to put their medication into the hands of private caregivers there are also many obstacles for patients on the registry. Many private caregivers often grow out of their homes. With only 5 patients or less, they usually do not need more grow-space than is provided within their basements, garages, or other rooms converted for the purposes of cultivating medication for their patients. Since private caregivers are only allowed 5 patients, this means that the chances are high that they cannot afford criminal preventative measures such as security cameras and advanced locking systems on their doors.

Larger grows operated by dispensaries can mean more standardized grows and to a patient that can mean high quality, but more importantly it can mean consistent quality. Consistent quality means safer medication.. Although high quality cannabis can be produced in small grows as well. It has more to do with the skill and care with which the grower tends their pants than the size of the grow.

Patients who have found this medication's benefits are passionate about it and not likely to stop using their medication just because they cannot get it in their home town. By banning dispensaries, you are sending the City of Longmont's tax dollars to the City of Boulder. In these tough economic times, can the City of Longmont really afford to hand that money over to the City of Boulder, or Lafayette, Louisville, or any of the other surrounding cities who are deciding for themselves whether or not they want the tax revenue that HB1284 has ensured will be collected from all but the most indigent patients on the Registry such as myself?


Even people who want to live within the letter of the law may make poor decisions out of desperation and turn to the black market to get their medication. Pain can cause a feeling of desperation, patients may be forced to turn to the black market to obtain their medication if they cannot get to a place where they can get their medication. Pain can drive you to do things you would rather not do, or wouldn't do if you weren't so desperate for relief.


I stepped out of the shadows and got onto the registry so I could be safer. You ban dispensaries and you make me unsafe again. You invite the black market in to serve a local need. As patients with a medical need, we do not want to, nor should we have to turn to criminals to obtain our medication.

I myself boycott the cannabis black market. but I certainly don't look down my nose at anyone who uses cannabis for a medical or spiritual reason and is forced to obtain or grow it illegally for whatever reason. I don't look down my nose at those who use it for recreation either, being safer to the body than tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, and many of the other â??Recreationalâ?� substances used regularly by members of our society.


However, make no mistake, Cannabis isn't about fun and games for me. Cannabis is about relieving constant pain just enough that I don't have to be in bed all day. Cannabis is about not wasting away to nothing. Cannabis is about easing the fear the pain and constant illness can cause enough so I can get much needed sleep, but cannabis is also about being able to push the effects of my pain out of my mind so that I can be effective during the day.

My disease, Fibromyalgia with allergy onset of symptoms, is not a terminal disease but it can certainly make you wish it were, and I have been suffering from it in some capacity since I was born in May of 1979 in Canon City, Colorado. Instead I linger in this world, aching from the top of my head to the tips of my toes every second of every day since August 21 2002. Instead, I force myself to eat, struggling to get enough calories into my stomach, then and vomiting up food I can't afford to replace until I do not even want to TRY to eat anymore. Instead I tell my muscles to do one thing and they may do it, but not always in the way I tell them to, making me appear clumsy, but also making me accident and injury prone. Instead, the problems with my nervous system that cause non-epileptic seizure activity. Instead of the peace and freedom from pain death would bring me, I linger on a tired used up body trapping a young mind that wants to do so much more than to lie a sickbed and pray for the illness to stop. Instead I get to hear the specialists say over and over that they do not know what else can be done to give me my life and movement back. Since I have been on the medicinal cannabis, I still have to deal with pain and nausea, but rather than using 20 or more prescriptions every day, I treat my disease with only one medication: Cannabis. As a person forced by my disability to depend on social security disability, those 20 prescriptions costs were largely covered by the American and Coloradan tax payers under medicare and medicaid. Some of my prescriptions cost upwards of $500 a week each, and I was taking more than 20 different medications a day! Cannabis to keep me reasonably comfortable for the same period of time could cost as little as $160 (if I were to purchase it by the gram at $20 per gram).


One month after I got on the registry, I was off of all of my prescriptions with the blessing of my doctor. My friends and family say I have come back to life. I haven't found it necessary to be in the doctor's office nearly as often. Before I was on the registry I often found it necessary to be in my doctor (or a specialist office) several times a week. Since I was put on the registry I have needed to be at the doctor's office only 3 times since June 2009. The decrease in doctor visits have also saved the taxpayers money. Meanwhile I struggle because I do not have the funds to pay for my medicine, and sometimes I do without food to pay for my medication. The new law has prevented me from obtaining medication for free out of compassion from various dispensaries and growers in the area who in months past had ensured I was supplied with enough medication regardless of my ability to pay. I have personal experience with 3 of Longmont's dispensaries, and been fairly regular customer in them until July 1. These three dispensaries are: 1) my caregiver Larry Hill of the Apothecary on Coffman, 2) The Zen Farmacy on 3rd street, and 3) Colorado Patients First on Hover Street. I found the dispensaries in our town to be professional and concerned with the well being of their patients as well as concerned with operating under the letter of the law.


Again, I do not presume to tell you how to decide on this issue. I do humbly beg that you not make my difficult life even more harsh by taking the access to my medication and moving it to Boulder.

Respectfully,
Breedheen O'Rilley Keefer
AKA Breezy Kiefair