MEDICINAL MARIJUANA IN THE NEWS PLEASE COPY AND DISTRIBUTE DrugSense FOCUS Alert #345 - Wednesday, 4 April 2007 On Monday, April 2nd, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson signed New Mexico's medical marijuana legislation into law - making New Mexico the 12th state to have legislation which provides some degree of protection from state marijuana laws for patients authorized by their doctors to use marijuana. Unfortunately, this historic event received little media coverage. CNN Headline News provided a fair but quick announcement frequently on Tuesday. But even within New Mexico press coverage was not extensive. One reason could have been that the press knew that the Governor would sign the bill. Another could have been that newspaper editors saw the spin given by the Associated Press wire service to the story as inappropriate, even false. See http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v07/n431/a03.html Since there were New Mexico Republicans who voted for the bill - and the AP didn't identify which Republicans thought that the Governor supported the bill for other than compassionate reasons - we wonder if even a majority of the Republicans in the state legislature would endorse the cheap shot in the AP story. Our best link to articles about the New Mexico law we have is http://www.mapinc.org/people/Bill+Richardson The push is on to pass medicinal marijuana bills in a number of other states, so it is possible that another state or two, maybe more, may pass laws this year. An example is an OPED that appeared Tuesday in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which was aimed at the southwest part of Illinois where the paper has a substantial market - designed to increase support for the Illinois medicinal marijuana bill. See http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v07/n429/a06.html Every day MAP archives news clippings about medicinal marijuana worthy of your letter to the editor writing efforts, easily found at this link http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm No, our volunteers do not find all the medicinal marijuana news items printed. Please check your local newspapers for stories. Local folks writing to their newspapers frequently find more respect from readers - and often higher chances of being printed - than those who write from far away We thank you for your efforts, be it writing letters, newshawking, or taking other actions from the local - city, county, state - to national and international levels in support of providing safe access for patients to medicinal marijuana. Thanks for your effort and support. It's not what others do it's what YOU do. Additional suggestions for writing LTEs are at our Media Activism Center: http://www.mapinc.org/resource/#guides Or contact MAP Media Activism Facilitator Steve Heath for tips on how to write LTEs that get printed. Don't Miss MAP's New & Improved Online Media Activism Conferences Join Steve and other LTE writing friends Tuesday evenings at 9 p.m. Eastern, 8 p.m. Central, 7 p.m. Mountain, or 6 p.m. Pacific for a roundtable discussion of how to write LTEs that are likely to be printed. We've added a Thursday roundtable at a later hour - 11 p.m. Eastern, 10 p.m. Central, 9 p.m. Mountain, or 8 p.m. Pacific, See http://mapinc.org/resource/teamspeak/ for easy directions on how to download, install and use the free TeamSpeak software. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. Discussion is conducted with live Voice (microphone and speakers are all that is needed) and also via text messaging. PLEASE SEND US COPIES OF YOUR LETTERS Please post copies of your letter writing efforts - or report your other actions - to the sent letter list ( ) if you are signed up for that list, or by emailing copies directly to if you are not. Your letter will then be forwarded to the list so others can learn from your efforts. Joining the Sent LTE list ( ) will help you to review other sent LTEs and perhaps come up with new ideas or approaches as well as keeping others aware of your important writing efforts. To join the Sent LTE email list see http://www.mapinc.org/lists/index.htm#form Prepared by: The MAP Media Activism Team www.mapinc.org/resource =.

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