6 Ways the Criminalization of Marijuana Defies All Reason and Logic

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4. Fine line between legal gardening and a felony. 

In those 17 medical marijuana states, trying to determine which pot smokers are healthy enough to deserve a cage and which ones are sick enough to protect from arrest is bound to lead to logical absurdities.  Fourteen of the states allow patients or their caregivers to tend a garden to grow their own medicine.  To deter large-scale growing operations, some states have implemented limits on the number of marijuana plants a patient may grow.

In a state like Washington, this is simple enough, as the state has specified fifteen as the total number of plants allowed.  But in Oregon and some other medical marijuana states, a distinction has been made between “mature” and “immature” marijuana plants.  Oregon’s limit is the most generous, allowing six “mature” and eighteen “immature” plants, to accommodate the fact that patients have to keep a continuous cycle of plants coming into maturity in order to maintain a steady supply of medicine.

However, the law completely abandons horticultural science in defining what a “mature” marijuana plant is.  In nature, a mature plant is one that is producing flowers, or in the case of cannabis, the buds that patients are putting into bongs, vaporizers, and brownies.  But in the Oregon Revised Statutes,  a “mature” plant is one that is greater than 12 inches in any direction or is producing buds.  So your thirteen-inch pot plant vegetating in the closet is “mature”, even though it is weeks from being mature.  It would be like setting the limits of sexual consent based on how tall a child is.

This has led to situations where growers are diligently following the law, tending six flowering mature plants and the next three sets of six plants in three stages, only to have one set shoot up from ten inches to fourteen inches over a weekend growth spurt.  Now the grower has twelve “mature” plants, even though only the six mature plants can produce any marijuana, and he’s no longer a patient, he’s a felon.

5. Feds denying that marijuana is medicine at all costs.

The government’s intransigence on the medical utility of cannabis is the most stubborn and hypocritical federal policy ever.  The feds will tell you, with a straight face, that marijuana is  a Schedule I substance and as such has no recognized medical value within the United States, even as seventeen states expressly recognize its medical value.

Now if you complain about the  17,000 peer-reviewed research papers sitting in the federal PubMed database that demonstrate medical use of cannabis, you’re barking up the wrong tree.  This is a federal government that itself has  patented the medical utility of cannabis and still tells you it is not medicine.

As if that weren’t hypocritical enough, the US government maintains a pot farm at the University of Mississippi.  This is the one legal weed grow in America, expressly allowed under the 1961 UN Convention on Narcotic Drugs for the production of cannabis for research purposes.  In 1975, a glaucoma sufferer named Robert Randall sued for the right to use marijuana, lest he go blind, and won.  This decision led to the development of the  Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program that produced and delivered medical marijuana for Randall.

Shortly thereafter, more patients sued to get access to medical marijuana, expanding to a few more federal medical marijuana patients.  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, AIDS activists began marshaling thousands of applications for HIV+ gay men who found marijuana to help combat the symptoms of their disease.  So rather than expand the compassion to thousands who would have benefited, the Bush Administration in 1992 closed the program to new applicants and the Clinton Administration in 1999 declared it would not be reopened.