(From California NORML’s Dale Gieringer)
Paypal, the well-known internet payment company has told California NORML that it will no longer accept payments to our “type of business” because we accept listing payments from cannabis-recommending physicians.
After years of offering free listings to physicians and collectives at our website http://www.canorml.org, CaNORML began charging a yearly listing fee to cover our costs last year.
PayPal froze CaNORML’s account in June, saying that by accepting listing fees from collectives, we were violating their Acceptable Use policy, which says, “you may not use PayPal in the purchase or sale of narcotics.” Although narcotics were not being sold over the CaNORML site, we reluctantly agreed to stop accepting listings fees from collectives that dispense medical marijuana, recognizing that even though they are legal under state law, they are illegal under federal law. However, we continued to accept payments online from doctors, attorneys, and members.
Now PayPal has stopped accepting payments from the CaNORML site because we continued to accept listing payments from physicians.
Please steal this graphic and link back to this story!
Under a ruling upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court (Conant v. Walters, 2003), physicians have the first amendment right to discuss and recommend medical marijuana for their patients, although they may not distribute it or help patients in finding it. PayPal was informed of this and wrote back, “We are not arguing the legality of this issue; we are simply stating that we have made the business decision to not be involved with this type of business.”
Because of its discriminatory policy and disregard of physicians’ first amendment rights, CaNORML submits that PayPal is not the “type of business” to be used by those who advocate for human rights. We will file a complaint with the federal banking committee over their practices.
Located in San Jose, California, PayPal was founded in 1998 and was acquired by eBay (California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s former company) in 2002.
Complain to: PayPal, 2211 N 1st St, San Jose 95131 (408) 376-7400
PayPal has been removed from the Stash Tip Jar and I have canceled my production company’s PayPal account. PayPal’s decision not to be involved in our “type of business”, when that business is the providing of a directory of doctors who recommend a legal medicine, is astonishing. They say it is a “business decision”, which to me means they decided that being involved with a website full of doctors’ names would be too risky… how? The doctors are legal, their recommendations are legal, the people receiving and using the recommendations are legal, so there is no legal risk involved. It can’t be that there is a business risk, that somehow other businesses are boycotting PayPal because it processes legal payments from doctors to California NORML.
No, this is nothing but another bigoted move from a company that thinks it knows more about medicine than doctors do, a company that thinks you and me and others who use marijuana as medicine are criminals, frauds, and economic undesirables. I encourage you to steal the graphic above and place it on your websites and pass it on to everyone you know. We showed Kellogg’s not to mess with the cannabis community; let’s show PayPal that there are a lot of us online and we’re not supporting them anymore.
[...] growing cannabis. PayPal, the online payment service, dropped its accounts with the websites of California NORML and CelebStoner.com for accepting advertising from medical cannabis referral [...]
nothing new. paypal has bee doing tis type of shit for years, im just thankful people are starting to catch on. they ripped a bro of mine off for over 24K , just because he sold a perfectly legal gun BARREL (not a gun, nothing serialized ,ect, just a plain old metal tube, but because it was a gun barrel, they said it violated their acceptable use policies and froze his account. he has been fighting wit them in court now for over 4 years.
I just got dumped too fu 58 k them