By Bill Laitner | freep.com
FERNDALE, MI — Tuesday’s election of avowed medical-marijuana opponent Bill Schuette to be Michigan’s new attorney general “isn’t going to be diminishing our fervor — we’ll keep standing up for patients,” Rick Thompson, editor of the Oak Park-based Michigan Medical Marijuana Magazine, said today.
“Hopefully, having good attorneys and doing a lot more education on this issue is going to overcome the political opposition in Michigan that’s trying to stop people from having safe access to their medicine,” Thompson said.
He said he led a protest, noon-1:45 p.m. today, of about 50 medical-marijuana patients outside a makeshift courtroom in Ferndale. The protest was aimed at participants in today’s continuation of court hearings for nine defendants charged after the Clinical Relief dispensary on Hilton in Ferndale was raided and shut down Aug. 25 by the Oakland County Narcotics Enforcement Team. Protesters carried signs that said
“Patients Are Not Criminals” and “Forfeiture Laws Turn Cops into Criminals,” after being brought by buses paid for by the non-profit, Ann Arbor-based Michigan Association of Compassion Centers, Thompson said.
Preliminary exams for the defendants were moved from Ferndale District Court to the city’s Kulick Community Center auditorium to accommodate the large audience of protesters, defendants, family members and attorneys, court officials said last week.
The hearings are to resume at 11 a.m. Friday at the Kulick center, 1201 Livernois.
source: https://www.freep.com/article/20101103/NEWS03/101103083/Leader-Medical-marijuana-fight-undeterred-by-election
