Medical marijuana protest at Capitol today -- even though advocate says lawmakers haven't been listening

Today, this will be where the action is.

CTI is urging supporters to attend a rally on the Capitol steps beginning at noon, with featured speakers including advocates such as attorney Rob Corry, would-be gubernatorial candidate Miguel Lopez, and Robert Chase, founder of the Colorado Coalition for Patients and Caregivers, who earlier this week demanded the recall of Denver City Council members due to the medical marijuana ordinance they passed.

The institute is also encouraging the medical marijuana community to participate in public comments in regard to the Massey bill, even though CTI's Laura Kriho concedes that such folks "should be losing morale" because legislators haven't shown much interest in listening to them.

"We've been encouraging people to write letters and show up at the hearing, because there's only two times the legislature is going to take public comment -- and the two times are in the committee hearings on these bills," Kriho says. "So it's important that they come. And hopefully they'll take the testimony before eight o'clock at night."

Kriho's referencing long delays for public commentary on Senator Chris Romer's bill to modify the relationship between doctors and medical marijuana patients, which is nearing the governor's desk.

"It seems to me that they want to obstruct the patients' voices by waiting them out," Kriho maintains. "They say they don't do it on purpose, but it seems to happen awfully frequently. It's like a battle of attrition to see what patient can wait long enough to testify without having to go home and take their medicine."

By Kriho's own admission, "we're not doing very good as far as getting legislators to our side," as witnessed by the near-unanimous support in the senate for Romer's doctor-patient bill. (Only Republican Shawn Mitchell voted against it.) As a result, people "should be losing morale. Look at Denver, where we've got 50 percent of dispensaries out of business from last week. That's pretty significant. And clearly, the legislature isn't in it for the patients. The ones I've talked to haven't cared at all about what we're saying; they haven't talked to any patients, and they haven't adopted any of their concerns.

"I know this, because I get copies of the letters the patients send to the legislature, and I see the responses from time to time. There just seems to be a big lack of compassion at the Capitol. They think everybody just wants to get stoned, and they don't realize there are people who depend on this medicine to live. So it's got to be frustrating for the patients to keep coming to these hearings and either not getting a chance to testify or not being listened to if they do."

She's just as frustrated by the relatively small number of Denver dispensaries that applied for official licenses by the March 1 deadline; like Chase, she believes the City Council "wanted to put a lot of dispensaries out of business, and they succeeded."

Councilman Chris Nevitt disputes this interpretation, and suggests that advocates like Kriho are hurting their own cause by demanding more than politicians are willing to give. Kriho counters that she's simply speaking out of concern for medical marijuana users.

"Is this a good situation for patients?" she asks. "Not at all. Their choices are going to be diminished, and the prices are going to go up. They say they want to solve the medical marijuana problem, but we're still waiting for a definition of what that problem is."

Nonetheless, Kriho doesn't want those who believe as she does to lose heart.

"People have to participate in the political process," she says. "We have to step up and do it. The caregivers have to step up and do it for their patients -- because their patients are just trying to heal themselves."

Page down to read CTI's objections to the Massey bill, as well as details about the noon rally today: