One lawyer is particularly focused on making sure that medical cannabis legislation does not progress in the state of Utah \u2014 and he has a troubling backstory.<\/p>\n
In 1998,\u00a0U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Trump-enabling Utah Republican<\/a>, affixed his name to an anti-cannabis pamphlet that can be most accommodatingly described as retrograde. \u201cHow Parents Can Help Children Live Marijuana Free,\u201d to which Hatch contributed the foreword, can best be described as dishonest, borderline racist nonsense.<\/p>\n According to the pamphlet<\/a>, it\u2019s easy to tell if someone is a cannabis user. Stoners display \u201cexcessive preoccupation with social causes, race relations, environmental issues, etc.\u201d In other words: If you are a liberal\u00a0\u2014 the kind of touchy-feely socialist who would stick out like a heretic in deeply conservative Utah \u2014 you are probably a pot user.<\/p>\n This rhetoric is the product of Walter Plumb, a Salt Lake City attorney who was once law partners with Hatch. At the time, Plumb praised his own work, which he co-authored with a criminologist as the \u201cthe best work on marijuana that\u2019s ever been out,\u201d and declined to apologize or even justify the pamphlet\u2019s more outrageous, Nixonian claims, such as asserting that a teen\u2019s sudden interest in \u201cRastafari\u201d stuff is a clear sign that they have a drug problem.<\/p>\n Hatch doesn\u2019t deserve a pass<\/a>. His spokesman told the Deseret News that the senator was confident the book was a \u201cgood project\u201d that would \u201ckeep kids off of marijuana,\u201d and in his foreword, the senator deplored a \u201cmorally depraved society\u201d that has \u201cchosen to embrace, rather than attack, this plague\u201d of marijuana use. It\u2019s worth noting that Hatch says he now sort of supports cannabis,\u00a0saying<\/a>\u00a0that it can \u201cchange people\u2019s lives for the better\u201d and working to approve medical marijuana research at the federal level, now that voters have decided they like it<\/a>.<\/p>\n But the real wrongdoer here is Plumb. And look! He\u2019s at it again.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Plumb, now a real estate developer and owner of a pharmaceutical company, still feels so strongly about keeping legal cannabis away from all Utahans that he is spending $100,000 of his own money to stop it,\u00a0as the Salt Lake Tribune reported<\/a>. Plumb is also the leader of Drug Free Utah, the organization founded to keep a medical marijuana effort off the November ballot.<\/p>\n And since Drug Free Utah\u2019s effort to convince the more than 100,000 registered voters who signed the petition to change their minds failed,<\/a>\u00a0Plumb is also the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking to keep the measure away from voters.<\/p>\n Why? What could possibly inspire such zeal? According to a Deseret News article on the pamphlet, Plumb lost a close relative to a heroin overdose. In a recent interview, Plumb did not mention that, nor any connection to the opiate crisis \u2014 nor yet any data that would justify or at least explain his distaste for legal cannabis.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat they want is recreational marijuana,\u201d Plumb told The Salt Lake Tribune last week. \u201cThe right to get high.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe forgotten group in this whole thing is kids,\u201d he added. \u201cJunior high kids and high school kids.\u201d<\/p>\n The Utah Medical Cannabis Act<\/a>, if approved by voters 18 and older, does not allow for personal cannabis cultivation, nor does it allow for cannabis to be smoked, by anyone. It is among the most \u201cconservative\u201d cannabis ballot initiatives seen in America by design.<\/p>\n Plumb\u2019s opposition is not based on the facts of the bill. Let\u2019s not forget that, even if this were a legalization measure, which it is not,\u00a0according to virtually every study conducted on the matter<\/a>, marijuana legalization does not appear to affect youth use rates.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the Plumbs of the world persist\u00a0and are willing to squander their personal fortunes in the name of anti-cannabis activism.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>,\u00a0who are other prominent figures pushing against cannabis?<\/p>\n The post Meet the Utah Man Fighting to Keep Medical Marijuana Off the Ballot<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
One lawyer is particularly focused on making sure that medical cannabis legislation does not progress in the state of Utah \u2014 and he has a troubling backstory. In 1998,\u00a0U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Trump-enabling Utah Republican, affixed his name to an anti-cannabis pamphlet that can be most accommodatingly described asContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4051,50,4490,119,139,1603,3802,424,4491],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26698"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26698"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26699,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26698\/revisions\/26699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\nRead More: Meet the Utah Man Fighting to Keep Medical Marijuana Off the Ballot<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"