I noticed, here in the Washington DC suburb of Gaithersburg MD, a Washington Post story providing an eighty one year old reason to vote “yes” on four and legalize marijuana — in Massachusetts and eventually nationwide:
Margaret Holcomb, an 81-year-old woman from Amherst, Mass., grew a single marijuana plant in her garden, tucked away behind the raspberries. She used it to ease the ailments of old age: glaucoma, arthritis and the occasional sleepless night.
She hadn’t tried to get a medical marijuana card, because of the challenges of getting a doctor’s approval, she told the Daily Hampshire Gazette. And traveling to the dispensary in the next town over and paying for marijuana grown by someone else would be too costly, she feared.
So on the afternoon of Sept. 21, a team of Massachusetts State Police and Massachusetts National Guard troops sent a helicopter, several vehicles, and a handful of troopers to Holcomb’s house to chop down the plant and haul it away in a pickup truck.
These were Massachusetts, not federal, authorities. Fortunately, no one was arrested and nobody was hurt.
Thankfully, Ms. Holcomb appears to be just the sort of independent and perhaps cantankerous resident that stirs inspiration in me:
Holcomb told the Gazette she is considering simply growing another pot plant. “I don’t picture them out here and putting an 81-year-old woman in jail,” she said.
What kind of person, and what kind of government, harasses and persecutes an elderly woman this way?
Surely it is time to put a stop to this insanity.
You don’t really want to know what I think about this outrageous miscarriage of justice. So I’m going to count to ten and leave you to contemplate my four guiding principles on the subject.
” Justice will not come to Athens until those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are injured.” THUCYDIDES
” Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
” In a just society, there is no limit to how high one can climb but there is a limit to how far one can fall.” JARED BERNSTEIN, VP JOE BIDEN’S ECONOMIC ADVISER
” The law and justice are barely cousins, and most of the time they aren’t even on talking terms.” MARLON BRANDO PLAYING SOUTH AFRICAN ANTI – APARTEID LAWYER IAN MACKENZIE IN 1989’s ” A DRY WHITE SEASON”
Fred Rich LaRiccia
I am an older guy who has a lot of older friends. It is sometimes amusing to see how my friends and neighbors use informal connections to pass weed amongst each other. It can be truly funny in some cases except when they run out of their medicine. Most were not pot heads in their earlier years. Some have cancer, some have chronic pain issues, MS and other bad stuff. Cutting them off is inhuman.
but why don’t your friends get prescriptions for medical marijuana?
I have asked that question and mostly they are afraid of a mix of prosecution (possession is still a federal crime and for the guys who come from the WW2 generation that can be a big deal), shame and an admission of vulnerability/need. If you do not have a history of using recreational drugs, admitting to a need for weed might seem difficult. And if you are confronting mortality (that includes me) going to your MD and asking for one more drug might be a tough task.
I do not judge their internal conflict. I do think it is an act of social destruction that we have criminalized weed but have built empires and a culture on tobacco and alcohol. BTW, I have consumed adult beverages and do not condemn it but also recognize it is probably less healthy than weed
I know you’re “in the middle” of this line of questioning, so this response is in no way attacking you; just trying to make heads or tails.
1. Prosecution: is there a (logical) line of thinking that by-the-books medical marijuana users are more likely to get prosecuted than those who self medicate using the local pot dealer?
2. Shame/admission: this sounds like exactly the wrong kind of self-medicating. This sounds like self-medicating with a 12 pack. Admitting to a doctor that you’re in pain? Jeez, if they can’t do that…
I mean, I don’t doubt your claims, and I don’t mean to seem flippant or otherwise negative. I’m just frustrated that legalizing marijuana for medical uses still leaves “holes” like the ones you describe.
if the closest dispensary is an hour away, and it will cost you a hundred bucks or so (on top of the $ for the state ID card — and who wants that anyway), why not plant a couple seeds and see what happens?
If marijuana for medical use is legal, why is it not available at your neighborhood pharmacy?
Pharmacies distribute controlled substances as defined by federal law. Do you really think that they should be selling marijuana, which is still illegal under federal law?
If it’s illegal to sell under federal law that would apply to everyone. This is precisely why I think states have put the cart before the horse. Federal law should relax first, then let states figure out how to proceed.
Of course it remains illegal under federal law. But most advocates for decrim, medical marijuana and outright legalization operate under the notion posited by Brandies, that our states are laboratories of democracy.
I am trying very hard not to point out some of the obvious failures of your thinking, so let’s just look at the SJC Goodrich decision and the long effort by some of us to uphold it in subsequent Constitutional Conventions. And yes, that the SCOTUS later came to agree with us. Do you really think it would have happened without MA leading the way?
Like you, I do not smoke weed. But I know stupid policy when I see it.
EOM
First, when I kid I try to remember to use the smiley emoticon.
The difference with Goodrich is that there was never a federal ban on same sex marriage. Marriage was always the province of the states, though some proposed a constitutional amendment to ban SSM outright for all jurisdictions. DOMA simply said that the federal government would not recognize such marriages and that states which objected to such marriages were excused from recognizing such marriages contracted in other states. Therefore, when MASJC ruled that the state constitution required such marriages to go forward it in no way violated the Supremacy Clause of the federal constitution.
In this case, federal law expressly prohibits the use, possession, and distribution of marijuana. The only reason a state might defy federal law is to set up a constitutional challenge, but I see no constitutional right to pot and AFAIK nobody who favors question 4 or similar laws is making such a claim.
Do you remember the whole defense of marriage thing?
…I refer my honourable friend to the comment I made exactly on this matter directly above yours.
You wrote
“”The state” is not challenging the authority of the federal government to legislate against marijuana. A group of motivated voters and donors are proposing to end state laws that make smoking weed against state law. Some voters may think all sorts of dumb ideas about its impact on federal law but please don’t bring that here. You really should try to understand the difference.
If it were “the state” as you describe it, it would be in the form of a suit by the AG but even then it would not be “the state,” it would be the AG and neither the Executive nor Legislative branch, i.e. NOT the state. This is real simple.
There are various ways the state can act – as the people directly, as the legislature, as one of the executive officers, as the SJC. If question 4 passes it becomes officially the position of the state that pot should be legal (and already is as far as the state is concerned).
I might add, when you are voting on Question 4 you are not voting between allowing marijuana use and disallowing it, but between not prosecuting, taxing and regulating the suppliers or prosecuting and not taxing or regulating the suppliers. Usage rates remain unchanged by the law. But the revenue the state gains in taxes, the costs the state saves in prosecutions, and the safety of the supply the state can secure through smart regulations will change. And that is change for the better.
You’ve used this argument several times. It is a particularly specious argument. If, in the above paragraph, you substitute the words “bank robbery” and/or “bank robbers” for every instance of ‘marijuana’ and/or “suppliers” the argument is changed not at all and would be, in that instance, derided for its speciousness. Your argument that usages don’t change under the separate regimes merely reduces to a tautology: some substances shouldn’t be banned because they shouldn’t be banned.
Marijuana is a psychoactive substance. We either regulate or ban outright psychoactive substances. Tobacco, alcohol, oxycontin, cocaine, marijuana and heroine are all psychoactive substances. Some, like tobacco and alcohol are heavily regulated. Others, like oxycontin are even more heavily regulated. And some, like cocaine, marijuana (presently) and heroin are (mostly) banned outright People who wish to flout any such bans are breaking the law. So, in word and deed, on Question 4 you are, decidedly, voting to allow or disallow behavior. Disallowing the behavior provides consequences like fines and incarceration (not an escape from a tax). Allowing the behavior requires taxation.
As, and if, we move marijuana from a substance outright banned to a substance regulated comparisons to the scope of the prior regime are entirely specious: There is no negative or missing taxation on an illicit trade because that trade is not required to occur and, in fact, the absolute requirement is that it does not occur. That it does occur is not a function of whether or no marijuana should be legit, but rather failures of both law enforcement and self-control. If we make the trade licit, we don’t get to consider the purely hypothetical taxes that should have been payed out when illicit.
Caffeine is also psychoactive. We don’t ban caffeine.
It seems to me that the argument against marijuana has more to do with puritanism than public health. As a society, we appear to be far more comfortable with psychoactive than those, like marijuana, that give us pleasure.
We don’t like people to get high.
And there is no convincing people that don’t want other people getting high, but my argument does do that. Since the law utterly fails at prohibiting the activity you oppose, which will occur whether the law allows or disallows it, you might as well make money off of it. This is conceding as a given the science behind classifying marijuana in the same bucket as tobacco or alcohol and not the same bucket as heroin.
But we do regulate it. Very weakly, I’ll grant, and with disputation, but it is regulated. Regulations on tobacco are conditional bans (age). The same is true for regulation with respect to alcohol: it is conditional (age and place). Bans on oxycontin and now marijuana are more stringently condition (permission of MD required). Of the ones I listed previously, only cocaine and heroin have absolute bans in the Common.
Imagine that… Massachusetts, a CommonWealth with deep ties to the actual Puritans, might have a legacy. Who’d a thunk it? Your argument is with history and so it amounts to little more than a spitting malice, straight into the wind.
But neither will I let you get away with eliding the possible public health dimensions of marijuana use. The public health concerns are unknown: they are likely not extreme, but neither are they negligible.
And…? So what? We also don’t like people robbing banks, no matter how much having physical possession of money is pleasurable. If we allowed things solely on the merits of whether or no they give pleasure where would we be?
I would have thought that you and I would agree that we don’t like people to feel entitled…
Marijuana causes fewer deaths than alcohol, and not nearly as many cancer related deaths as tobacco, which are already legal. Both are more chemically addictive than cannabis. There is even growing data that teens, who are prevented by law from purchasing either and should avoid both for health purposes, would be better off experimenting with marijuana than alcohol.
Bearing this evidence in mind, you conceded that the law is not acting as a deterrence to usage. And it seems that usage is as problematic or less problematic than two legal products, than we see it doesn’t make sense to continue avoiding the taxation and regulation of marijuana. Were we to treat it like alcohol, there would be substantial cost reductions, revenue increases, and public health controls that are not currently present.
Your counter to my calling your argument specious is to make spurious arguments?
Both Alcohol and tobacco are in use by many orders of magnitude more people… so of course there will be more people affected by both alcohol and tobacco: there are more people using alcohol and tobacco. Duh. When the number of marijuana parlors is equal to the number of bars and restaurants where one can partake, let’s compare then….
I concede no such thing. I concede the failure of law enforcement to impose an absolute ban which is not the same thing.
I understand your questions about medical marijuana. As a non-user of it (and all other recreational drugs) I need to work to get inside the mind of users. I get it when people are addicted to illegals and think I understand how and why it happens. It is terrible but it happens and we need new polices to help them but that is a separate issue.
I spend a fair bit of time with people in their 80s. A lot of them, especially the Korean War vets, want to believe that the US government is just. They have a knee jerk reaction in wanting to follow the national law (most of my guys have an equal knee-jerk reaction in hating Trump). The last two of my WW2 era friends have seen enough shit in their lives to not care much about the law but neither uses weed.
My sense, and it is only my sense, is that my friends are so committed to the law that they feel guilty about breaking it even while they know that it improves their lives. Chemo and glaucoma and chronic pain fuck with their bodies but conventional medicine has too many side effects. So they break the law and do it on the down low, their way of trying to be healthy and not be flagrant in violating the law.
My female friends with health issues don’t seem to share that same sense of obligation to follow the law. But then again, most women I know are smarter than the men I know.
but this is really interesting. Perverse, but interesting:
It seems from the coverage of this story that the position of law enforcement is to decline to press criminal charges provided that the property owner does not ask to see a search warrant. To put it another way, they’re saying — accept this possibly illegal seizure or risk criminal prosecution by exercising your constitutional rights.
…is a reason to re-examine enforcement methods, not a reason to dump the law entirely. I’m fine with medical marijuana, but the same standards should apply as for other drugs which are controlled by prescription and enforced in a like manner. If she really did have a single plant then a warrant should have been served for that plant and executed by local police to seize said plant. The woman should have used legal methods and/or legal substances for her situation.
Who cares that she’s 81? She broke the law and she got busted.
Sure, the arrest is overkill and the drug enforcement time/effort/money could be spent on better things, but if a 21-year-old would get busted, the 81-year-old should get busted too.