Who is the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition?

Our mission is to reverse the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado. We are a coalition of nearly 7,000 individual members and over 100 faith and community organizations who have united to stop perpetual prison expansion in Colorado through policy and sentence reform.

Our chief areas of interest include drug policy reform, women in prison, racial injustice, the impact of incarceration on children and families, the problems associated with re-entry and stopping the practice of using private prisons in our state.

If you would like to be involved please go to our website and become a member.


Monday, January 18, 2010

Carroll: The pot dispensary wars - The Denver Post

Carroll: The pot dispensary wars - The Denver Post

Medical marijuana backers just won't take yes for an answer. The Denver City Council this week took the extraordinary step of passing regulations that will allow 200 to 300 marijuana dispensaries in a town where none existed just months ago. Not a single council member voted no.

So were dispensary backers grateful? Not on your life. The hearing was rife with complaints that the restrictions trampled on patient and caregiver rights. A lawsuit was threatened. From the alarmed reaction, you'd have thought the council had been supplanted by a cabal of pot prohibitionists from the attorney general's office.

The irony is that the dispensaries — in Denver and elsewhere — face a genuine threat: The legislature is considering shutting them down by limiting each "caregiver" to five patients, making such disputes as occurred in Denver irrelevant. "If you believe in the dispensary model — and I believe in the dispensary model — you better start working now to save it," Councilman Charlie Brown advised the critics, after counseling flexibility on their part.

Brown is right. The self-righteous carping only confirms the worst suspicions of dispensary opponents: that the medical marijuana lobby is actually interested mainly in the backdoor legalization of cannabis itself — a status that Colorado voters rejected in 2006, six years after they legalized medical marijuana with Amendment 20.

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