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Patients, caregivers, and their advocates need to be aware that the Washington State Medical Use of Marijuana Act does not prevent unsympathetic police and prosecutors from treating them badly. If patients or caregivers are arrested; if their plants are cut down; if they are ordered to the floor with guns to their heads; if their homes are tossed; if they are dragged off to jail; if they are incarcerated; if they are charged with the crimes of growing, possessing, delivering, or possessing with intent to deliver marijuana; and they have valid authorizing paperwork, they then have the opportunity to raise the medical marijuana defense in court - after this parade of horribles. The statute provides what lawyers call an "affirmative defense." It is akin to self-defense. If you kill someone who is attacking your friend, you can still be arrested, hauled off to jail, interrogated, and charged with murder. You get to raise the affirmative defense - in court and no sooner - that you were acting in self-defense. But you cannot raise the shield of self-defense to prevent your arrest in the first place. Neither can a patient, under the current Washington State Medical Use of Marijuana Act, prevent her arrest or the seizure of her medicine if a police officer chooses to exercise his discretion in this fashion. This is true whether the patient is growing a single plant or 1,000.
While there is no mention of plants in the Washington State Medical Use of Marijuana Act, it is misleading to claim that there is no plant limit in the state law. The law places the following limit: a sixty-day supply. The problem, which is immediately obvious, is that this amount will be different for every patient - and sometimes even vary over time for the same patient. Also, immature plants might have no usable medication toward the sixty-day supply, while a small number of harvestable plants might put a patient over her sixty-day limit. Clearly, we need to do much work to provide greater protection and clearer guidance for patients, caregivers, and law enforcement alike.
Alison Chinn Holcomb, Director
Marijuana Education Project
ACLU of Washington Foundation
705 2nd Avenue, 3rd Fl.
Seattle, WA 98104
206.624.2184 x. 252
http://www.aclu-wa.org
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