Remember, prosecutors have some degree of discretion about what they chose to prosecute. This is a perfect example:
A Minnesota prosecutor will proceed with a child endangerment case against a mother who provided medical marijuana to her son to treat symptoms of a traumatic brain injury — despite the fact that Minnesota recently passed a law allowing cannabis oil to be used for medical purposes — ThinkProgress reports. That law, however, will not go into effect until 2015.
Angela Brown’s son, Trey, suffered the injury at a baseball game three years ago.
“It just hurts in my brain everywhere,” Trey said. “I really can’t explain the pain.”
Along with the pain, he suffers from uncontrollable muscle spasms and seizures so severe that he had to stop attending school and caused him to be suicidal.
“I was afraid to go to the bathroom,” his mother Angela Brown said, because “he’d be harming himself.”
Last winter, she took Trey to Colorado, where they found a doctor who prescribed a particular strain of cannabis oil to treat him. “Within an hour of him taking it, we could tell a difference,” Angela Brown said.
When he returned to school, teachers and administrators wondered about his seemingly miraculous recovery. When Trey informed them, however, they were less than pleased.
“It was a week later when my mom called and said, ‘The cops are looking for you,’” Angela Brown said. Police seized the oil and charged her with child endangerment and causing a child to need protection.
His father, David Brown, said that Trey’s symptoms have returned since he stopped using the oil.
Thanks, David Benowitz.
The oligarchy (the enforcers of the law) have us all convinced that the ancients smoked mary jane because they were of low character and simply wanted to get high. Maybe that’s not why some Egyptian or Greek fired up a joint three thousand years ago at all. The oligarchy (1%) talks us in to all sorts of nonsense on a daily basis. Perhaps the time has come for the 99% to take charge of the whole enchilada and enforce the laws that the 1% violates all day every day?
This sh*t pisses me off to no end!
I have a good friend whose teenage son has a severe form of epilepsy. Severe enough that the has had several life threatening seizure episodes. The prescribed treatment is a regime of pharmaceuticals that essential turn him into a zombie that rarely leaves his bedroom. The alternative that they have found to work just as well with none of the horrible side effects is marijuana.
This also really really pisses me off.
I’m no tin-foil hat nutcase, but I seriously believe our government has demonized marijuana in order to control it and profit from it themselves. I don’t think there is any question they are in the drug business. There is so much we don’t know about what is going on. And the dumbass wingnuts who think it’s the devil’s work piss me off even more. It’s harmless people – or would be if it was legal. Nobody has ever died of an overdose but somehow it’s more evil than alcohol. I don’t even smoke although I used to – no problems with addiction to it either.