New York City’s Oldest Medical Marijuana Buyer’s Club Will Close Under New Law
Club Blended Harm Reduction With Medical Marijuana, Counseled Patients On How To Use Less Marijuana
New York State’s new medical marijuana law is so restrictive that New York City’s only patient’s buyers club is officially closing. Kenneth Toglia, the founder and former director of the NY Medical Marijuana Patients Cooperative announced Manhattan’s oldest marijuana buyer’s club was closing due to the passage of the new law named the Compassionate Care Act. 
Founded by Toglia more than sixteen years ago, the patient’s cooperative was known for it’s unique blend of harm reduction and medical marijuana. “The NYMMPC was the only dispensary in the nation that counseled its patients on how to use less marijuana. Group members included patients living with: AIDS, cancer, Glaucoma, Bi-polar disorder, PTSD, Krohn’s Disease, depression, anxiety, Multiple Sclerosis, and myriad other illnesses. “The new law was written to limit and exclude many care providers. Our policy was to accept any patient who could prove they had any serious disabling illness,” said an unnamed spokesperson for the club, “either with a doctor’s note or an equivalent.” Many of these people don’t want to use ‘cannabis oil’ which is processed with harsh chemicals and solvents. “We wish they would have asked us,” said a 39 year old woman suffering from neuropathy. “Marijuana is non-toxic and safer than aspirin or Motrin,” said another anonymous patient, “marijuana prohibition is like some kind of old racist joke.”
“There is a climate of fear in New York that has never been lifted. New York is still the capital of marijuana arrests in the world and the Compassionate Care Act won’t change that”, says Toglia, the former director. Toglia was arrested in 2001 with a number of patients and marijuana in the University of the Streets, a jazz community center on the Lower East Side. The Muhammad Salahuddeen Theater was the group’s headquarters for many years.
The patients of the former Lower East Side institution are now working with Occupy Weed Street to demand an immediate end to all stops, fines, and arrests for any possession, use, distribution or cultivation of marijuana in NYC and to form a statewide membership organization to lobby for Senator Liz Krueger’s Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act. “You’re not really for medical marijuana unless you are for regulated, taxed marijuana” said Occupy Weed Street Activist Harrison Schultz. “The Marijuana Regulation Taxation Act will be the best way for medical marijuana patients in this state to access to organic, homegrown medicine in NY.”
“We are also communicating with the office of our City Council Representative Steve Levin in order to build grassroots support for his city-wide resolution to support the Marijuana Regulation Taxation Act,” according to Occupy Weed Street activist Lorna Shannon.
Both activists agreed that taking the fight to the city’s government is the most effective means of legalizing marijuana in the Empire State given that New Yorkers don’t have access to the kinds of direct ballot initiatives that the people of Colorado and Washington used in their states to legalize marijuana.
“Our state legislature is apparently much more corrupt than the states that have listened to their citizens and acted upon the popular demand for marijuana legalization. New York spends about six times as much of it’s people’s tax dollars on its prisons than Colorado does and you’ll see that the prison profiteers are the same organizations that are bankrolling the campaigns of the very same senate leaders who worked the hardest to make the Compassionate Care Act the most restrictive piece of marijuana legalization legislation in the nation today if you follow the money,” according to Schultz and Shannon. “This is why we’re preparing ourselves for an incredibly bitter fight for our rights to our medicine.”
For more info, please contact:
Kenneth Toglia k.toglia@gmail.com
Harrison Schultz Schuh072@newschool.edu
Lorna Shannon Lornalynnshannon@