Cannabis Conference in San Jose

June 21, 2016
Today we left for San Jose. Is bittersweet as we are taking Grandma Marg back the city so she can fly home on Thursday… However I am super excited that she will be able to come with us to the Legislative Assembly tonight to hear various different speakers. We took the 11am ferry so we could make the 6pm conference. Tonight’s speakers are a priest from El Salvador, a retired DEA agent from New Jersey, a patient, and two Senators. It was pouring rain and the traffic at 5 in San Jose is terrible but we made it on time thankfully! We met with Emmanuelle, he was hosting the conference. He is a very nice man and is trying to help get medicinal cannabis passed here in Costa Rica.

We were asked to sit in the front row. Everyone was very happy we made the journey to come. There were many lights and the speakers were talking loud.. I began to get over excited from it all. When the priest spoke he talked about how he has had to sit beside many people suffering from an illness such as cancer dying in pain and how he felt God put this plant here to save lives and help those suffering in pain. The DEA agent, Lieutenant Jack Cole was great in explaining how after all these years of prohibition the US only made things worse and caused more people to use. He was passionate in his belief that the drug war is steeped in racism, that it is needlessly destroying the lives of young people, and that it is corrupting our police.
He said he felt terrible about all the lives he ruined by arresting innocent people for smoking cannabis. He is co-founder of LEAP. Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. He was really nice man and very smart and he kept smiling at me the whole time!

By the time the third speaker came around, I was about to squirm out of my seat. So Naty and grandma took me outside to stroll me around. It was too much stimulation for me and it was getting late. I missed hearing my mom speak. She got up at the end of the conference and spoke how Cannabis has helped me so much, how the pharma drugs had caused me so many other problems, and how if your child was suffering from epilepsy wouldn’t you try anything to help your child to stop having them? It was powerful and we were all very happy that we were able to attend and hopefully Costa Rica will legalize medicinal cannabis soon.
Love Malia

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