Thank you, Santa Fe Reporter, the Justice Project, NM in Depth–and especially don’t forget to mention State Senator Bill O’Neill who courageously championed the bill that first brought this to many of our attention. Blood vengeance doesn’t exist only among youth gangs, criminal syndicates and international terrorists. It also crops up far too often within parole board hearings where the focus is exclusively on the crime…thirty or more years after that occurred. When we will move past that primitive, reptilian thinking?

It is technically true that hemp legalization failed in 2015. But it actually passed both houses by wide margins. Then to the amazement of most legislators, Governor Martinez vetoed it. Her message was a non sequitur: “Hemp is still illegal in the US.” She ignored the okay given by the Congress to hemp cultivation in the 2014 Federal Agriculture Department Appropriation bill…provided any State that wanted to permit hemp cultivation had to pass a bill authorizing it. That was the bill she vetoed. It is on her shoulders exclusively that while a dozen or more other states are beginning to realize the benefits of hemp production, NM is once again on the outside, looking in.

The saddest chapter in NM behavioral health history now is complete…except that HSD continues to refuse to accept the findings and incredibly is asserting that the companies who have been cleared now still have to reimburse the state millions! For what? Meanwhile the Arizona companies that were given $27 million to come into NM have steadily returned home, leaving us poorer but no wiser. Only when the voters demand that Governor Martinez explain this sordid mess and make things right for the accused (and exonerated) agencies will the book be closed in reality.