Medical Marijuana: We Have to Wonder Why Nine Years Elapsed Between Voter Approval and the Decision to Protect the Consumer and the Public From Graft and the Lugubrious Practices of More Than 180 Dispensaries in Denver.

There will be a public hearing on Article XI. Medical Marijuana Dispensaries, January 11 before City Council at 5:30 p.m. at the City and County Building.

Did the City Council feel that this was an innocent franchise business connected to hospitals and clinics? Did they pretend to ignore the outcome thinking that no one would take these enterprises seriously? Did we believe that the medical doctors would all have the highest scruples and protect the patients from abusing the service? Did law enforcement think that because they are already overburdened that the incidental indiscretions of medical marijuana dispensaries would in some way be an unnecessary waste of their precious energy? Whatever the case may be the public is actually to blame for this mess because enough of us voted for this enterprise for it to take root.

If you read one of the local weekly papers from pages 78 through 88 there are countless come on ads in many styles and many that are thinly reaching out to the clients on the proceeding pages for other adult services. The placement of this cavalcade of ads is planned to create the mystique that there is something sensual and available to all who pay the price of admission.

The real purpose of medical marijuana dispensaries is to treat people who are in the throes of dying and need relief. Most of those who voted for amendment 20 in 2000 expected that this would be an enterprise that was highly regulated by the medical providers and care givers from places such as hospices. For a person experiencing acute, chronic pain there is ample reason to provide any means of sedation and marijuana has long been sought as a means of relaxing, as some people drink alcohol, or smoke a cigarette. In Amsterdam, where the limits of behavior is tolerated, the existence of all of these practices finds a natural place in their well formed and established tolerance of diversity.

In our small city landscape many of the beneficiaries of the businesses are the mafia and not the patient, as the ballot amendment was intended. It is sad that this is true for our lustful society but it is not without precedent. Insurance providers and the medical practice continually over charges and do not care for the patient ahead of profit. The medical marijuana dispensaries simply fit into the landscape of medical care in this market driven economy.

Personally, the matter of regulating dispensaries is a moot point. We would be much better served believing in what we have and our relationship to one another with peace and justice for all. If a person genuinely needs this medicine then it should be freely available as the plants were growing all over the sides of the highways in the 1930’s. Anyone can grow the crop with little effort since it is a weed that is highly adaptable. If everyone who wished to consume marijuana simply had their own plants that would be the end of this salacious feeding frenzy and the clinics would dry up and disappear.

I just found out about one very relevant film showing at the Estes Park Film Festival between Sept. 17 and 20. Read below and then if you are interested, go to the festival web site at www.estesparkfilm.com

Here's the film about education

THE PROVIDENCE EFFECT SYNOPSIS

Paul J. Adams III, an African-American man with activist roots in the 1960’s civil rights movement, came from a family of teachers. After being black listed himself as a teacher in Alabama because of his civil rights activities, he moved to Chicago, received a master’s degree in psychology, and then landed a job as guidance counselor at Providence St. Mel, an all-black parochial school on Chicago’s notorious drug-ridden, gang-ruled West Side.

A year after his arrival, Adams became principal, only to be told the following year that Chicago’s archdiocese was going to close the school. After orchestrating a fundraising campaign that received national and local media attention, funds poured in and enabled Adams to buy the school from the Sisters of Providence and convert it to a not-for-profit independent school. To ward off thieves and vandals, he literally moved into the empty nuns’ quarters of the convent inside the school.

He then set about achieving a new goal: To turn Providence St. Mel into a first rank college preparatory school, and its African-American student body into a corps of driven, disciplined, high achieving students.

That was over 30 years ago. Since then, 100% of Providence St. Mel graduates have been accepted to college, half of them, during the last seven years, to first tier and Ivy League colleges and universities.

The road from failing inner city school to a pre-K-through-12 educational system that produces graduates who attend Ivy League colleges and universities was not a smooth one. THE PROVIDENCE EFFECT traces the school’s development from a struggling shoe-string budget dream into a school and a method of teaching that produces not only inspired students, but parents, teachers and administrators dedicated to settling for nothing less than the highest expectations.

As testament to the hurdles overcome, and the efficacy of the teaching model that governs education at Providence St. Mel, THE PROVIDENCE EFFECT features interviews with alumni who share how the school re-wrote the failing, mediocre lives that had been scripted for them because of their West Side origins. The shared consensus is that the school’s philosophy set them up for success because greatness was expected of them.

Cameras in class reveal how teachers are held to just as high and demanding a standard as is expected of the students. Administrators are dedicated to insuring that a teacher’s first and only job is to teach….not to administer, not to become bogged down in red tape or hindered by a self-perpetuating bureaucracy.

In the 80s, President Reagan visited twice, remarking in the film, “This is the way it should be done.” As a young organizer, President-to-be Barack Obama also visited the school.

THE PROVIDENCE EFFECT is an effect that is on the cusp of becoming viral nationally: The school’s teaching method has been so successful that in 2006 another school, this time on Chicago’s south side became a charter school --- appropriately named Providence Englewood --- solely in order to achieve the same results. In two short years, these students scores have gone from the 9th percentile to the 50th percentile on the Terra Nova Standardized tests. Students at Providence Englewood significantly outperform other schools within their neighborhood.

Those improved scores are…THE PROVIDENCE EFFECT.

Source and to see more:
http://www.theprovidenceeffect.com/

Looking through the portals of distant observations there are many ways that I can remember loving you long before I knew that you were here.

I sensed you sitting on my lap with your arms wrapped around my neck and pulled my head closer to touch you and wrap you around like a bedspread that covers and wraps the toes and head of the person lovingly holding me in your affections and feeding fruits that trickle down the chin and are lapped up in your mouth succulent and furtively kissing away the sweetly tenderly and brushing away doubts and fears of this moment between us.

We are on the edge of great precipice watching the growing fires in our hearts stoking the embers and flying high in the sky to the delight of the intended audience of onlookers, rushing over the edge we fall together embracing and holding one another to brace the fall, only to sense that we are falling in love as often young lovers do with openness and nuances of the dawn of light that glows and rends the heart. Creating from this expanse a new bridge built of dreams and collecting our beauty radiating from the lofty sight of the other coming to hold and walk arm in arm forever.