I guess the cops are so busy looking for patients growing a little medicine for others that they've overlooked drunk drivers, crack cocaine and heroin.

Sgt. Pat Walsh should spend more time fighting drug cartels and less time busting patients.

Also, shame on you for calling sick patients "rogues".

I hope you get sick and find that the only medication giving you relief is illegal

 

Maybe the police are the abusers in this situation. I've noticed that it takes a long time for DHS to do the paperwork, sometime months and months. Only time will tell.

But, if I had my say where my tax dollars go to, I'd say go after the real criminals, those who actually hurt others and take their property. Not after some guy who grows a plant.

The war on drugs has become a war on citizens and their rights.

The state takes away the children because of too many plants???? Where's the logic here??? If they had the correct number of plants, it is not call child endangerment.

In this insane war on drugs, the real losers are the children. They do not deserve to be taken away from the parents unless some real harm comes to them, not just because their parents grows a plant!!! One in forty parents are in jail from the war on drugs. Society will pay for that years down the road.

It is always a sad day when the police take your children. My heart goes out to this family. The police and the state need to reexamine their pot priorities. Citizens and families need help...not destruction.

I,m sure some sick people could use that medicine that was hauled away... My bet is that the police destroy the medicine instead of acually helping the sick and disabled in our community. The real rogues here can be seen by the actions that are taken in this case....you be the judge!

 

amen DH on "The war on drugs has become a war on citizens and their rights."

true true.

BUT "marijuana abusers" are NOT rogues.

alcoholics are rogues.

meth-heads are rogues.

liars, cheaters, and thieves are rogues.

big-money that keeps mj illegal are rogues.

i may be a caretaker for my mother who has MS. and i may take the occasional toke, but that does not make me a rogue.

there are waaaay too many incongruities in our laws:

1. alcohol's legal (yet alcohol has ruined lives- my grandmother has half her tongue cut out from alcohol/cigarette abuse yet is still an alcoholic)

2. alcohol is illegal if you're under 21, yet you can sign your life away in iraq at the tender age of 18 (oh but it's ok, cuz soldiers can drink on the base)

3. you can buy weight-loss pills over the counter- which are potentially dangerous to your health

yet you can't puff/ingest/grow the most benign substance known to man.

 

Unless Pipkey & Longboard were forcing the seven-year-old to take bong hits, the only potential "child endangerment" involved here comes from the police who might burst in, automatic weapons drawn, with a no-knock warrant in a SWAT-style raid, or from the criminals who might burst in to steal a weed that's worth half its weight in gold. Prohibition is what creates the dichotomy between twelve plants grown to alleviate suffering and thirty-six plants allegedly grown for a profit motive.

Furthermore, Popkey & Longboard's OMMP cards allow them to grow 12 "mature" plants and up to 36 "seedlings". The law is currently written so that an immature plant that is taller than 12 inches is considered "mature", even though it is weeks or months away from producing medicine. Therefore, these "three times the legal number of plants" aren't necessarily all "big as Christmas trees and each capable of producing up to a pound of pot".

When you survey drug task forces, of course their biggest issue is medical marijuana. It makes their job harder. They can't just go rip up any pot plant they find; they have to actually go to the OMMP and determine if someone is a legal grower (paperwork - the bane of all police!). Patients who can now legally grow their own equate to fewer people to bust for illegal marijuana, which brings about lower budgets for drug task forces, less profit borne of asset forfeiture, and less positions required for drug task force officers.

Are there medical marijuana "abusers"? I imagine that in any bureaucratic system there is some non-zero percentage of fraud. As long as prohibition keeps the price of marijuana artificially exhorbitant, there will be the temptation to abuse the system for profit. I assume that we won't make the imminently sensible move of ending adult marijuana prohibition anytime soon, even though every government study from the 1894 British East India Hemp Commission, to the 1942 LaGuardia Report, to the 1972 Consumer Reports study, to the 1973 Shaffer Commission Report to President Nixon, to the 1999 Institutes of Medicine report, to the 2005 Miron/Friedman Study of Prohibition recommends we do so.

So with that assumption, let's examine what happens if this tiny minority of "abusers" do commit fraud on the OMMP. The state gets $100 of their money per year and registers their name and address in a state database. Law enforcement may identify the location of the grow site at any time for cause. The "abuser" no longer spends $400/oz of his hard-earned money supporting a criminal black market for the weed he was going to be smoking anyway. And if the "abuser" is caught selling or even giving his medicine away to a non-patient, he loses his right to grow marijuana legally for five years. It seems to me like these alleged "abusers" would get less attention and be more successful by not registering with the OMMP. It also seems to me the biggest harm of the abuse is all of that untaxed commerce that could easily fund the Oregon Health Plan or fix a few of our decaying schools. (Miron/Friedman found that taxing and regulating marijuana similar to alcohol would reap $10-$14 BILLION nationwide per year. Other studies have shown that legal marijuana would not cause an increase in marijuana use. Teens in the Netherlands, where marijuana is tolerated, have half the rates of marijuana use as Americans, and teen use of marijuana has decreased in California in the decade since the passage of their first-in-the-nation medical marijuana law.)

But I'm betting these two are anything but "abusers". I am an OMMP caregiver and my partner is a patient. We renewed our cards on December 7th and have yet to receive our new cards. DHS is notoriously slow in their paperwork turn-around.

The neighborhood smelled like pot? The whole neighborhood? That's some mighty powerful herb, there. And as for the foot traffic, is it possible that all they're seeing is patient/caregiver-friends of these two who are coming by to share medicine (perfectly legal under OMMA) since the state didn't see fit to create any legal method of acquiring or distributing this medicine?

There are over 12,000 patients in Oregon and only 5,000 caregivers. Many patients must routinely go without the only medicine that provides them a life worth living because they can't find a caregiver, they can't grow their own, the state provides no way to acquire medicine, and they won't go to purchase on the dangerous criminal black market. If some medical marijuana growers are violating limits and that causes more medicine to make it into the hands of our most vulnerable sick, disabled, and dying Oregonians, then so be it.

"Radical" Russ Belville

Associate Director, Oregon NORML

(Co-Host of the medical marijuana meetings mentioned in the "Garden of Weedin'" story.)

 

Thank you all for your eloquent responses to this idiotic knee-jerk sensationalism.