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USA: Repeal questions right of voters to decide

Peggy Barta

Billings Gazette

Sunday 15 May 2011

The 2011 Legislature repealed the medical marijuana bill, arguing that Montana voters, who overwhelmingly approved this voter initiative, were too gullible to understand what we were voting about. Instead, the Legislature took the statute out of voters' hands and imposed something onto the residents of Montana that they claim to be what voters really want.

Simultaneously, the Legislature decided on two voter referendums: 1) Whether a girl under age 16 should be required to notify a parent or appear before a judge for permission to proceed before getting an abortion. 2) Whether Montana voters want to prohibit a federal mandate to buy health insurance by 2014 (Billings Gazette, Sunday, May 1).

Additionally, while decrying the dire addictive, social, and family consequences of legalized medical cannabis, legislators allowed video gambling machines to add "line games" to their venues (Billings Gazette, Sunday, May 1). Shall we presume that providing greater laxity to the gaming industry, an industry fraught with serious issues of addiction, mental illness and family degradation, is somehow an acceptable social ill while medical marijuana is not?

For me the point is not the legalization of medical marijuana. Rather, it is more fundamentally the preservation of voter initiatives/referendums in this state and my concerns over lobbying power of special-interest groups in Helena.

http://billingsgazette.com/news/opinion/mailbag/article_2f3786c3-db7c-555b-8d3f-3a57a2affc1e.html

 

 

 

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