PRESS RELEASE of Legalise Cannabis Ireland

For immediate release

Legalise Cannabis Ireland is is to hold two marches for cannabis in Dublin and Cork next Sat. May 7th at 2:00pm; further details are available online and through the organisations Facebook page.

This will be the fifth year that the group has been organizing the marches, which aim to challenge peoples’ conceptions about marijuana, and confront an increasingly untenable drugs policy which has proved incapable of suppressing personal marijuana use or supply, or embracing the plant’s medical and industrial values.

The group, which has recently received the support of Independent TD’s including Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan and Mick Wallace, set its Dublin and Cork protests to coincide with this year’s Worldwide Marijuana March to which over 600 cities have signed up. Speakers for the Dublin event include Luke Flanagan and Gordon McArdle from the Compassionate Use of Medical Cannabis Act and in Cork, ex politician and retired high school teacher Vincent Lavery who has spent thirty years in California advocating the need to decriminalise marijuana for medical purposes and the need to study the effects of the present war on illegal drugs in Ireland. Vincent Lavery has written extensively on the state of the present war on illegal drugs in Ireland and the United States and ran for Congress alongside Bobby Kennedy. John McCarthy a local medical patient who also writes for a local paper will also speak.

This years events are expected to be the biggest yet. The global movement aims to bring cities and populations together in a united annual stand against governments’ generally hostile stance towards cannabis.

Legalise Cannabis Ireland says that a number of promising developments have bolstered hopes that drugs policy reform may finally be on the way for Ireland — if only in legalising the plant as a medical aid — most notably an instruction from the Department of Justice to the Department of Health to enact an EU agreement allowing patients the uninhibited right to carry psychotropic drugs, including cannabis, once medically prescribed. This breakthrough move comes on the back of recent EU overtures that states should not inhibit or enact legislation allowing cannabis for medical purposes. The carrying of medical cannabis was legalized in the UK last year and its medical use is currently legal in many US states, including, perhaps most prominently, California. A meeting last year between (then) Tánaiste Mary Harney and reform advocate-cum-solicitor Gordon McArdle set in train a process which culminated in the drafting of a bill to legalise medical cannabis — the Compassionate Use of Medical Cannabis Act, which although not enacted, proved to be a powerful incentive for further drugs-policy lobbying.

A member from LCI, said:

“These protests are part of Legalise Cannabis Ireland’s strategy to address cannabis policy reform and to further our aim of ending the prohibition of cannabis in all its forms and guises.”

“Our view is that prohibition has failed in its main objectives to reduce harm and supply to society.”

“I would also like to suggest that we consider the likelihood of industrial hemps potential for our future. Despite being able to create over 25,000 eco products including fuel and paper none of the political parties have any plans for industrial hemp. Industrial hemps potential far outweighs that of any commodity which we produce currently as it could provide green stimulus to all sectors including consumption. If we don’t do this others will so lets not lose sight of this opportunity to create green jobs, revenue and growth with industrial hemp and continue on our goal of exporting innovative products around the world with Irish graduates NOT emigrating abroad to meet this new hemp economy.”

“LCI is calling on the public to show their support for this cause by attending one the marches.”

For further information please contact us on lcicork@gmail.com

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