STATE HOUSE — Seven experts with experience in marijuana policy, including legal, medical and business types, will help a group of 20 Massachusetts voters next week dive headfirst into the debate over the marijuana legalization ballot question in order to give fellow voters easy to understand information on the initiative.
The experts, including two officials who work directly with Colorado's legal marijuana industry, will be questioned by the 20-voter panel of the Citizens' Initiative Review (CIR), a pilot program designed to produce pro and con statements about the ballot question that could be easily digested by average voters.
The tension was heavy in a recent meeting. The participants had competing agendas, different personalities and diverse perspectives. Being privy to side conversations before the meeting, I knew that they were making judgments about each other. Instead of coming together as "we," they were defending and protecting the "me."
In his classic book "Nonviolent Communication," Dr. Marshall Rosenberg suggests that this behavior isn't so unusual:
