Get Involved

Please click here to visit our Action Center and get involved.  

If you agree that sick people should not face arrest or jail for using medical marijuana with their doctors' approval, you can help in the following ways:

1. Visit our Action Center. Our automated system will easily allow you to send letters to your legislators and to newspapers.
2. Contact Minnesotans for Compassionate Care by e-mailing mail@minnesotacares.org if you are interested in volunteering in your community to help pass the medical marijuana bill into law. 
3. Ask your legislators to take action to protect medical marijuana patients from arrest and jail. Click here to find out who your legislators are.
4. If you are a doctor or nurse, click here to sign our statement of principle in support of safe and legal medical marijuana access.
5. If you are a medical marijuana patient or a caregiver, click here to tell us your story.
6. Write a personalized letter to your legislators.
7. Write a letter-to-the-editor. Letters-to-the-editor are a great way to encourage public discourse on medical marijuana.

   Tips for writing effective letters-to-the-editor:

   Try to convince the reader in as few words as possible — not more than 200 words, preferably fewer. The shorter and more powerful a letter is, the more likely it is to be published.

   Be sure to include your contact information — including your phone number, city, and ZIP code — so that the editors can verify that you are the author of the letter. Many newspapers will not publish letters that cannot be verified.

   If possible, make your letter more timely by mentioning a recent news event in your area or an article in that newspaper. Letters referring to an article the paper has recently published are the most likely to run.

   If sending your letter by e-mail, do not send it as an attachment. Because attachments can carry computer viruses, many newspapers have programs that block all e-mails that have attachments. Paste the text into the e-mail itself.

   Some points you can mention in your letters

   • Medical marijuana is a popular issue. In May of 2008, a SurveyUSA poll showed that Minnesotans support medical marijuana by more than a 2–1 margin, and state medical marijuana initiatives have been repeatedly endorsed by voters.
   • This is not a partisan issue; it is a compassion issue.
   • Many otherwise-illegal substances, such as cocaine and morphine, can legally be prescribed by doctors. The same should be true for marijuana.
   • Many of the legal alternatives proposed by opponents of medical marijuana are too expensive, too addictive, and have too many side effects to be good medicine for all patients.
   • Chemotherapy patients who are too nauseated to eat or swallow a pill should not have to fear arrest if they — and their doctors — find that smoking marijuana is the most effective means of treating their symptoms.
   • Ultimately, the decision of what medicine is best for an illness should be left up to the patient and the doctor, not to the government.
   • When they have their doctors' approval, patients should be able to use medical marijuana without fear of arrest and imprisonment. They should also be able to rely on a safe supply of marijuana, without having to resort to the dangerous criminal market.
   • Our state government should use tax money to prosecute violent crime, not punish medical marijuana users.
   • For all of these reasons, Minnesota's legislature should enact laws that protect patients from arrest and imprisonment.