Pubdate: Thu, 15 Jan 2015
Source: Jerusalem Post (Israel)
Copyright: 2015 The Jerusalem Post
Contact: http://info.jpost.com/C002/Services/Feedback/editors.html
Website: http://www.jpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/516
Author: Ben Hartman

HIGH HOPES SPUR CASH HARVEST FOR GREEN LEAF

Pledge of Legal Marijuana Present Nets Party Nis 100,000 in Donations

A promise of marijuana in the future in exchange for campaign 
donations today helped the Aleh Yarok ("Green Leaf") party net more 
than NIS 100,000 in donations this week.

The campaign, launched in a YouTube video on Saturday, promises 
donors who front it campaign donations that they will receive 
marijuana if and when the day comes that the plant is legalized in Israel.

On Monday morning, the party opened a Headstart Web fund-raising 
campaign with a range of options for donors. The Web page includes a 
sliding scale of theoretical marijuana in exchange for contributions. 
At the lowest end, an NIS 50 donation entitles the donor to a savings 
bond redeemable for a single gram of marijuana once it's legalized. 
The bond, which features a marijuana flower on it, costs 
significantly less than the street value of a gram of marijuana in 
Israel (NIS 80-100), and by Wednesday the 56 spots available for that 
donation had all been purchased.

The party seemed to get a bit creative when creating the sliding 
scale of donations. For NIS 420 (a reference to slang popular with 
marijuana consumers) donors are eligible to receive 5 grams of 
marijuana, plus an Aleh Yarok T-shirt and a collectible lighter. 
Those who donate NIS 10,000 will get help to "open a coffeeshop," if 
and when marijuana is legalized and Israel becomes home to 
Netherlands-style coffeeshops. So far the party has received one 
donation at the coffeeshop level, which includes a gift of 150 grams 
of marijuana, as well as 20 at the NIS 420 level.

By Wednesday evening, the bumper crop of donations stood at NIS 
115,285, and the party announced on Facebook that it is now shooting 
for NIS 300,000 to fund a nationwide billboard campaign.

In the campaign video posted on Saturday, Aleh Yarok party head Oren 
Leibovitz touts marijuana advocates' success in recent years at, in 
his words, making marijuana legalization and consumption more 
acceptable and mainstream in Israel.

"We've done all of this with no budget, imagine what we could do with 
a party budget and five parliamentarians? We are a half a million 
cannabis smokers in Israel; it's enough that only a quarter of us 
vote Aleh Yarok and change will be here," he says in the video.

In late December the party announced that Leibovitz, the founder of 
the online magazine Cannabis. com, had been elected chairman.

The Green Leaf party has run in five previous elections and failed to 
make it into the Knesset, and the legislature's decision in March to 
raise the threshold from 2 percent to 3.25 percent will only make it 
more difficult this time around.

Still, with the promise of free marijuana, even if it's only 
theoretical, its chances of finally blazing its way into the Knesset 
may be looking less hazy.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom