GRIEVANCE FILED OVER MARIJUANA BILL

As the semester draws to a close, members of George Mason University's
Students for Individual Liberty are still hoping that the student
government elections will be rerun due to a referendum that never appeared
on the ballot.

In the last meeting of the fall semester, the student senate passed Senate
Bill 4: An Act Introducing a Referendum on Marijuana Policy. Former senator
Nathan Larson, the author of the bill, said that he wrote SB4 "to help free
students from government oppression."

Larson's bill asked Mason students, "Shall a resolution be adopted
requesting that the Virginia General Assembly remove all criminal penalties
for possession of marijuana by a person aged 18 or over?" When the question
did not appear on the ballot, vice president of the Students for Individual
Liberty Daniel Lurker filed a grievance against student elections
commission chair Robin Moxie. Lurker requested that the entire election be
rerun with the referendum on the ballot.

The SEC reviewed the grievance and denied Lurker's request on the grounds
that Moxie never received the referendum because both the executive branch
and the student senate had taken actions to kill SB4. Student body
president Shirene Rasheed said that she pocket vetoed the bill between
semesters and during the senate's adjournment. Larson argued in an e-mail
written to Rasheed that her executive veto had been misused. Rasheed's
secretary of administration Jesse Binnall responded in a written statement,
"Clearly the meeting at which [SB4] was adopted was the final meeting of
the senate's first session; therefore the president was within her
authority by pocket vetoing the legislation.... The provisions contained in
[SB4] therefore never came into effect and, since it was not adopted at any
latter meeting of the senate in their second session, the president was
under no obligation to order any officer of the executive branch to
implement such provisions."

The student senate passed a motion to rescind the referendum in a meeting
April 10, thus taking back the previous vote to include it on the ballot.
According to Robert Russell, speaker pro tempore of the student senate at
the time, "The senate had decided that going through with this referendum
was going to do nothing but make student government look like a joke with
Richmond. Coming into a semester where the senate is going to be active in
working with the Virginia legislature on funding and tuition issues, we
need them to be able to take the senate seriously, and bringing this sort
of thing to them would have been counter-productive."

Lurker and president of the Students for Individual Liberty Zachary
Gochenour filed a petition with the student supreme court on April 20,
claiming that both the senate's motion and the pocket veto were invalid.
Lurker and Gochenour requested all correspondence, meeting minutes and
agendas for the meetings in which SB4, Lurker or Larson was mentioned.

The materials were offered within five days, in accordance with the Freedom
of Information Act, but at a price of over $400, according to Gochenour.
"We declined because the charges were too high. It was over $31 an hour in
search fees," Gochenour said.

Chief justice Maurice Chimah declined to comment, saying that the court had
not yet decided when they would hear the case. Gochenour said that they
were assigned a docket number last week and are still hoping to see the
referendum on the ballot in the future. "My personal suggestion is that
they rerun the election in the fall, when students are back on campus," he
said.

Larson continues to push for the referendum and for the legalization of
marijuana, although he graduated last semester and is no longer a member of
student senate. "Regardless of the merits of the health and scientific
issues, marijuana should be legalized on the constitutional basis.

We live in a capitalist society where products should be traded freely.

Even if thousands of people were dying from pot use, I would still favor
its legalization," Larson said.