Letters to the Editor
"Equal"
AND "Different"
Many people are getting hung up on the term
"civil union" and are attempting to assert that the term itself
means that we are not equal to straight married people.
I disagree with that for a variety
of long winded reasons that I won't go into, BUT the main reason that
I LIKE the term to be different than "marriage" is because we
are different from straight married people so why should the term that
is used to define a straight union be identical to the term that is used
to define a gay or lesbian couple? I mean really, let's use our OWN terminology
to define our OWN institutions, rather than mimicking everything straight
people do. The fact that the term IS different, differentiates us FROM
straight people... what's wrong with that?
Patti York
Smithtown, Long Island
Misinformed on Marijuana
In his April interview with OITM,
Gov. Jim Douglas showed himself to be shockingly misinformed about medical
marijuana.
Douglas claims, "The FDA has made it
very clear that not only does it reserve the right to prosecute people
who use it, but also government officials who sanction it." This
statement is absolutely false. The FDA does not prosecute users of unapproved
medicines, and has neither taken nor threatened any action against the
hundreds of state and local officials now administering medical marijuana
programs in Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon
and Washington. Such action is simply not in the FDA's job description.
Even John Ashcroft's Justice Department
- an agency as hostile to medical marijuana as any organization this side
of the Gestapo - has not acted against local officials who administer
marijuana registries and have issued thousands of patient identification
cards. Even the Santa Cruz, California City Council - which invited a
local medical marijuana co-op to distribute marijuana to patients in the
courtyard of City Hall - has not been subject to any prosecution or federal
harassment.
Douglas is also wrong when he claims the
FDA "decided against" approving medical use of marijuana. In
fact, the FDA has never considered the issue. The classification of marijuana
as a Schedule I drug - barred from medical use under federal law - was
a political decision made by Congress, a decision in which the FDA played
no part whatsoever.
States are not required to have laws that
match federal statutes, and there is absolutely nothing requiring Vermont
to have laws that subject people with AIDS and other serious illnesses
to arrest and jail for using medical marijuana. Since Gov. Douglas acknowledges
that marijuana "provides relief to people," he has no reason
not to support the medical marijuana bill, S.76, now before the Vermont
House of Representatives.
Bruce Mirken,
Director of Communications
Marijuana Policy Project
Washington, D.C.
OOPS Department: You may have noticed an odd lack of apostrophes and quotation marks in the April issue (but wasn't that fun to get full color on the cover?!). Here's what happened. Our office printer blew its fuser (the part that makes the ink stick to the paper) in the middle of layout. Fortunately, Seven Days art director Don Eggert responded to a frantic request for help and generously offered his services. However, their copy of our typeface, Times New Roman, was faulty and blipped out the apostrophes and quote marks. Under a time crunch and relieved to have pages to paste up, we didn't catch the glitch. - EB