Last week an article was published by Business Insider that was forwarded to me by many friends and readers. The title of the article was ‘Five People Who Are Leading The Fight To Legalize Marijuana.’ I was instantly interested as soon as I saw the title of the article, because after all, marijuana is now legal in two states and there are numerous efforts to legalize marijuana in other states via the legislative process. My interest wore off pretty fast though when I saw that many names were omitted from the the list, and the order of the names included in the article were ‘troubling’ to me to put it lightly.
Don’t get me wrong, some of the names on the list are my personal friends, and they have no doubt done amazing things for the movement and will continue to do so. However, when you create a list of people that are leading the fight to legalize marijuana, you absolutely have to start with the people that have already led the fight to legalize marijuana and won…So if you are creating a list of say, five people, those five people would logically have to come from the Colorado Amendment 64 campaign and the Washington I-502 campaign. The discussion of who to include would not, and should not, involve names of people that weren’t leading those campaigns. Of the five people named on the list in the previously mentioned Business Insider article, only one of them led either of the success marijuana legalization campaigns (Alison Holcomb) that I mentioned…And she was listed as number five…
Again, I don’t want to take away from the efforts of the other people in the article, as they have done amazing things, and will continue to do amazing things. And as I said, a couple of them I consider to be personal friends of mine. However, when no one from the Colorado Amendment 64 campaign is included in a ‘who is leading the fight to legalize marijuana’ article, it does the people that are included a disservice by reducing the credibility of the article, while at the same time not rewarding people that have actually accomplished the task. It’s like creating a current list of the top five people trying to land on the moon, yet not including names of people that have already landed on the moon…
If I made a list of the top people leading the fight to legalize marijuana, at the top of the list are everyone that ran the Colorado Amendment 64 campaign tied with everyone that ran the Washington I-502 campaign. The list would be longer than five people obviously, but it would be accurate. Below is video footage of one of my heroes, and certainly someone that should be at the top of any list like I described in this article, yet who was omitted from the Business Insider article I have been rambling about – the legendary Mason Tvert:
