Open Letter to Kimberly Yee

Hello Senator Yee & your staff,

This is Mikel Weisser from Safer AZ (the cannabis reform group who testified on your bill SB1122), speaking as an individual. Our organization has tried to reach out to your office multiple times and failed to receive a single appointment, after over a year of requests. When the people cannot gain the ear of their representatives , how can justice ever be served?

Hopefully by now, you, or your office more likely, should have received extra attention the past couple of days over your efforts to block HB2333, presumably in favor of your own bill, SB1389, neither of which are likely to receive 3/4s vote from the house and senate and so, like your thinly veiled efforts w Kelli Ward on SB1122, it's mostly about the theater of appearing to be an anti-drug warrior in a time when that stance is becoming the equivalent of the new Jim Crow.

I have never understood the mentality of those who wish to dominate and oppress others. I prefer to think that that is not your motivation. With the course of history so clearly working against you, I wonder why you would continue to define yourself so. 

100 yrs from now, people will think of you & your fellow anti-cannabis warriors the same way we think of men like Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace ("Segregation now, Segregation forever!") or of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, who argued passionately for the principles of the Chinese Exclusion Act, saying that ethnic group was "so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States." 

 I ask you to think how different your actions are from these politicians, all of whom were once in the majority and thought of themselves as heroes of the public good, even as they destroyed the lives of millions and distorted the American Dream in their efforts to stop the progress of time and the will of the people.

Senator Yee, our organization, among many, many other well-informed concerned groups and citizens, have tried repeatedly to educate you on the abuses of power and abuses of the people your work has caused. We have provided extensive documentation,published our own articles, rallied public sentiment, proposed solutions (& provided them to your offices), & conducted multiple legislative interviews, often at great personal expense for suffering patients and victims our unjust laws, in an honest open effort to warn you of this folly of being part of perpetuating the wrong-headed, medically dishonest, corrupt war against cannabis. You have only turned a deaf ear and a cold heart.

This is not leadership, this is oppression. This is not sage wisdom, it's arrogant ignorance and willful disregard of the lives you've been entrusted with protecting. Look to the past, listen to the present and be ready for the future. 

History is passing you by.

--MIKEL WEISSER 3/19/14