Advocates working with the Marijuana Policy Project in Mississippi say they’re barred from raising money on behalf of the program because its director is a convicted felon.
The government of Mississippi announced that it will block the Washington D.C.-based Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) from doing any kind of fundraising in the state. MPP officials say the decision will hinder efforts to pass marijuana reforms in Mississippi and perhaps throughout the South.
MPP Executive Director Rob Kampia explained the situation in an email Monday:
The Mississippi government is saying that MPP is prohibited from raising money in that state because I’m a convicted felon.
After I was convicted for growing my own marijuana while in college, I co-founded MPP in order to repeal marijuana prohibition in all 50 states — something we can no longer do in Mississippi.
Worse yet, we’re not even allowed to raise money in Mississippi to challenge the state’s stupid fundraising law.
This isn’t the first time MPP has been discriminated against.
For example, (1) MPP almost lost our employees’ retirement plan until a member of Congress intervened, (2) the bank where we’ve been doing business for 20 years won’t give us a line of credit because they don’t like our “mission,” (3) we had trouble opening a brokerage account, (4) we had trouble getting credit card processing for our five ballot initiative committees, (5) numerous landlords wouldn’t lease office space to us or our campaigns, and (6) the IRS has audited us twice.
And now we can’t raise any money in the entire state of Mississippi because of a marijuana conviction 26 years ago?
The MPP is soliciting donations from supporters so that it “can challenge Mississippi’s bad fundraising law and continue our work to change some of the nation’s worst marijuana laws.”
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