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Canadians for Safe Access presents:
Green Truth - the Green Tide Shadow Summit 2004 (March 4)
Voices of Reason - Exploring Alternatives to the Drug War

Summary and Recommendations Coming Soon... for now, see Green Tide Propaganda

And take a look at our links page for some summaries as found in various media reports.

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From our Summit Debriefing:

Wow. What a day!

The Summit was a smashing success, very valuable networking, information sharing, strategizing and countering of the OACP propaganda.

Thank you all for your help and support and a job incredibly well done. We really are raising the bar, and letting the world's ignoramuses know that we'll play their game (and beat them at it) if that's what it takes.

John Gayder was incredible. What a great (and brave) guy.
Marc Emery ripped apart the OACP and MCS's ridiculous presentation.
Peter Kormos, wow, didn't expect that party-crasher and House Speaker to have so much knowledge and encouragement to share. Wise man.
Jude's submission was well received as delivered by Alison, whose own presentation was as moving and energetic as we've come to expect from our little fireball. LEAP, NDP and EfSDP, gotta love 'em.
Rui Pires (NDP) had lots of great stuff to say, at the summit and to the cameras.
We missed poor Steve Bacon whose health prevented him from attending. Hope you're feeling a little better bud!
Stephen VandeKemp made an excellent presentation - atta boy stevie!
One of the real highlights was an unbelievably moving presentation by Andrea Chamney, daughter of MaryLynne, who brought us all to tears (really, lots of tears), and then to our feet with cheers for her shockingly moving tale of how prohibition has harmed her and her family. Absolutely incredible.

We got through maybe half of what we had hoped to cover before turning the event into a more casual chatting, strategizing and media scrumming session. Which is cool, and leaves that much more for us to build upon in the future. We didn't really get to sufficiently cover such issues as privacy (thanks again Eugene), details about Bill C-10, Boris' view on the housing crisis, the Senate report, CRIT, media manipulation, safe gardening practices, etc. etc. but we sure did cover a lot, and it’s all in the “Report”! I'm up for a repeat next year (at the latest) if y'all are ready to help kick butt again! Seriously, an annual Drug Policy Conference in Toronto would be something I'd be thrilled to help organize.

Everybody involved did a fantastic job and I'm beamingly proud of all of you. Special mention goes to Tim, Marko, Blaine, and a couple others (including me I guess) who busted their asses on presentations which we were not able to comfortably accommodate. They'll be in the report and taken into consideration for the summary and recommendations. Next time we should perhaps expect a shorter conference considering that a lot of our (especially medicinal) participants were unable to stick around for more than 3 hours or so. But I'm not sure that 2 days would be realistic either.

The Sutton Place Hotel was perfect (one of Toronto's nicest hotels) - we had a posh suite with a perfect layout - a panelist table and U- shaped gallery table, all the amenities and accessories you could ever hope for, and a separate (and huge) room attached which was very comfortably used for refreshments, mingling and media interviews. And of course it was just great to have the OACP summit right across the street and folks coming from one summit to the other with ease.

The media attention was great, with the Toronto Star, CBC, PotTV, Now Magazine, and Elevator Films (for the Documentary Channel), among others, in attendance, lots of cameras, flashes, scribbling, audio recordings and one-on-ones. And at 9pm, Stephen VandeKemp and I really kicked some ass on City TV's (CP24) "Hunter's Gatherings" (environmentalist and social policy analyst Bob Hunter of Greenpeace fame) where we spread the truth about the OACP report, bill c-10 and prohibition in general being complete and destructive travesties. Marko and Cory (Amanda's brother), among others, called in and set us up with some excellent questions. ;) Thanks go out to Robin Ellins (Friendly Stranger) for helping to set up that appearance. It’s now available on www.pottv.net shortly, along with much of the Summit (coming soon). John from LEAP did both CBC News on TV and CBC radio I believe, and I’ve ordered tapes of both from www.bowdens.com.

We have lots of video to sift through and send to the right places, real good stuff.

Apparently the OACP scrum was met with quite a bit of well-deserved skepticism and distrust - nice to hear!

Much respect and enormous kudos to everyone, keep up the awesome work!!! We did the movement, and our great Nation, proud and... I can't wait to see where this leads us! In the ten years I've been working with this issue, I hadn't experienced one like last year - so full of progress and excitement. This one's proving to be at least as amazing.

Rock on!

All the best,
Dom

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