Editor of popular marijuana news website to head 'Green Leaf' party in 2015 campaign

The Green Leaf party has never made it into the Knesset in any of their previous 5 election campaigns.

By BEN HARTMAN
Marijuana plants are seen in a MedReleaf facility. (photo credit: ALEXANDER REPETSKI)
Marijuana plants are seen in a MedReleaf facility.
(photo credit: ALEXANDER REPETSKI)
The founder and editor of a popular online cannabis news portal will head the Green Leaf party’s 2015 election campaign, it was announced on Thursday.
In a post, the website’s founder and editor Oren Leibovitz wrote, “I am thrilled to accept the appointment as chairman of the party that represents the struggle I have been waging for years and I hope to bring hundreds of thousands of Israeli cannabis supporters to the ballot box in the elections.”
Leibovitz called on supporters to view the election as a national referendum on cannabis legalization and that the focus of the campaign will be “stopping the hounding of marijuana smokers” by law enforcement and the state, in addition to greater development of the medical marijuana industry in Israel and abroad.
The Green Leaf party has never made it into the Knesset in any of their previous five election campaigns and the raising of the electoral threshold from 2 percent to 3.25% in March will likely make it more difficult for them to make it into parliament this time around.
In the last general election in January 2013, the Green Leaf party ran on a libertarian-style platform of less government and more personal freedom, with a clean-cut image that was far from the hazy campaigns of past elections, including one that featured a TV spot with then-party head Gil Kopatch smoking pot on the grave of David Ben-Gurion at Sde Boker.
Leibovitz founded Cannabis.com three years ago and it has since become a highly-popular one-stop source aggregating news from across Israel and the world about medical marijuana and legalization. It also acts as a trade magazine of sorts, listing medical marijuana providers in Israel and providing information for people looking to become medical marijuana recipients.