Medical Pot Grower Beats The Rap
The King County Prosecuting Attorney's office decided last week not to charge Jon Graves with violating state law for operating a medical marijuana grow in the U District. Graves, who I wrote about last month, had been growing weed for as many as 40 medical marijuana patients—state law specifically allows a patient or their caregiver to grow and possess a 60-day supply of pot—many of whom were either too ill or lacked the expertise to grow their own. Graves was busted last year by SPD and the case had been sitting on the desk of the prosecutor's office since then.
But don't think that makes group grows, as they are known, legal.
In a letter to Douglas Hiatt, Graves' attorney, Mark Larson, the chief criminal deputy for the PA's office, wrote that although Graves was "clearly operating outside the statute [state medical marijuana law]" that his office wouldn't ring up Graves, a medical marijuana patient himself, because he had no prior convictions and there was no evidence that he was dealing drugs to nonpatients. Larson clearly states in the letter that this is a one-time deal, however: "You can't grow for more than one patient, period."
But, as both SW and the SeaTimes have reported, there is a good bit of underground group growing going on in the Seattle area. The reason? It's impractical to expect a new cancer patient to suddenly become an expert pot gardener while contending with chemotherapy and the like. So people have begun turning to cooperatives operating group grows.
Larson says the law doesn't provide that kind of loophole, however. "To operate in this manner with the law as written will put these people into legal jeopardy," he says. In other words, if group grows come to his attention, they will be prosecuted.
He states in his letter that patients and their advocates ought to work through the Legislature to try and refine the law, but he says he doubts they can muster the votes to make that happen. After talking with several legislators about that point, I am not sure that Larson has that, um, straight. There does seem to be a lot of back room support for clarifying the law to keep people like Graves and other chronically ill patients from being busted for smoking and growing the chronic.
3 comment(s)
Steph says:
\"patients and their advocates ought to work through the Legislature to try and refine the law..\" --
My answer to that comment:
\"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it\'s the only thing that ever has.\"
--
Margaret Mead
Walk on.
Posted On: Monday, Sep. 11 2006 @ 6:46PM
Seattle Native says:
So what Jefferson was saying was \"Hey! You know, we left this England place because it was bogus. So if we don\'t get some cool rules ourselves, pronto, we\'ll just be bogus too.\" Yeah?
Jeff Spicoli
Posted On: Monday, Sep. 11 2006 @ 9:19PM
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Posted On: Thursday, Jun. 21 2007 @ 6:56AM