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By Noelle Skodzinski
The state of Mississippi is banning the national advocacy and lobbying organization Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) from fundraising in the state because Rob Kampia, MPP’s executive director, was convicted of a felony 26 years ago, according to the MPP. Kampia was convicted for growing marijuana for personal use while he attended college.
Following his conviction, Kampia co-founded MPP to work to repeal marijuana prohibition across the country, he explained in an email letter to the MPP’s constituents. The MPP is also prohibited from emailing subscribers to MPP’s email list who live in Mississippi. “This is a circular ‘double screw,’” he wrote. The MPP therefore cannot raise money in Mississippi to challenge the state’s fundraising law.
“It is ridiculous to prohibit an entire non-profit organization from fundraising in a state because the group's director got caught growing marijuana as a college student more than two decades ago,” Kampia tells Cannabis Business Times (CBT). “Money equates to speech, according to the courts, and this is a gross violation of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. There is no rational reason why a felon with no history of financial crimes should be prohibited from raising money for political and educational efforts, such as those of MPP and the MPP Foundation. We are going to do everything we can to challenge this silly law.”
Chris Lindsey, staff attorney for the MPP, who says he believes Mississippi may be the only state with a fundraising law of this nature, tells CBT that the next steps to challenge the law will be an appeal process that starts with an administrative hearing.
“A judge would review the decision and either support or reject the determination by the Mississippi Secretary of State. If the determination were not favorable, our next step would be to seek redress in state court,” Lindsey explains.
“We believe the statute itself is vague, and that the secretary has read it unfairly. We also believe that if the secretary actually read it as intended, such a provision silences the speech of charitable groups for no valid reason,” he says. “Prohibiting organizations from raising funds to help fight injustice simply because they hire felons is inherently offensive. Organization like ours that seek improvement to the criminal justice system are even more likely to be discriminated because of that rule, and citizens in the state should not let this stand.”
Kampia, in his email letter, noted, “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,” he wrote.
MPP is now asking supporters to donate to the organization today, as Kampia explained in his letter, “so that we can challenge Mississippi's bad fundraising law and continue our work to change some of the nation's worst marijuana laws.”
