Dear friends:
Fresh off our winning ballot initiative campaigns [5] in Michigan and Massachusetts, the Marijuana Policy Project has just launched a campaign to pass a statewide medical marijuana ballot initiative campaign in Arizona.
If passed in November 2010, the initiative would protect Arizona patients from arrest and jail for using marijuana with their doctors' recommendation. This would make Arizona the 14th medical marijuana state (or possibly the 15th, 16th, or even 17th, depending on what successes we have between now and then).
We're feeling good about this campaign because in November we passed a similar initiative in Michigan with a whopping 63% of the vote — and we know we can do it again in Arizona.
But the first thing we need to do is get the initiative placed on the ballot. To do that, we must collect 153,365 valid signatures from Arizona voters, which means we need to collect about 250,000 gross signatures. We know from our past successful signature drives, like in Michigan, that it costs about $2 to collect every signature (because of the costs of paying canvassers, checking validity, and so forth), which means it will take $500,000 to fund this stage of the campaign.
Want to be part of this exciting campaign and help protect another state's medical marijuana patients from arrest and jail? Please donate what you can here [6].
As you can see at the bottom of this message, a major philanthropist is willing to match your donation dollar-for-dollar, so we only need you and other MPP members to donate a total of $250,000. Arizona patients and I are grateful for anything you can do to help [6].
Sincerely,
Rob Kampia
Executive Director
Marijuana Policy Project
Washington, D.C.
P.S. As I've mentioned in previous alerts, a major philanthropist has committed to match the first $2.35 million that MPP can raise from the rest of the planet in 2009. This means that your donation today [6] will be doubled.