Thousands want to help canvass for pot petition: Sensible BC
Posted August 1, 2013 7:22 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – The man behind the push to decriminalize pot in BC says a lot of people are ready to volunteer for his campaign.
Dana Larsen with Sensible BC says thousands of people have expressed an interest in registering as canvassers to gather signatures on a petition.
“We’ve only got a few hundred registered as canvassers so far, but that’s just because registration just opened,” Larsen tells News1130. “We figure we’re going to need five or six-thousand canvassers to hit the targets that we need.”
Hitting those targets will take a lot of manpower and a lot of work; in order to force a non-binding referendum or a vote in the Legislature, canvassers will have to get 10 per cent of all registered voters in each of BC’s provincial ridings to sign their petition.
“My challenge is to find enough people who care about this, not just to sign the petition, but to get out there and spend some time in the community and talk to their friends and family,” explains Larsen.
“But there is a lot of support for this issue and I tell people they have a chance to make history. If we succeed, they’ll be able to tell their children and grandchildren that they helped to legalize marijuana in British Columbia.”
The two US states that have legalized pot, Washington State and Colorado, have run into a few issues.
Marijuana is still illegal under federal law, and that was made clear when several marijuana dispensaries were raided in Washington last week. Larsen says if his campaign successful, BC won’t have problems like that.
“Our goal is ultimately to have a fully legalized system across Canada, but we can’t fully legalize in BC until we have a change in federal law,” he tells us.
“That’s why our campaign is to take a sensible first step and decriminalize possession in BC, which is in provincial jurisdiction. It’s not the final solution, but it stops millions of dollars from being spent investigating marijuana cases.”
Larsen’s team will start collecting signatures on September 9th. They will have until November to hit their targets.
