The California Supreme Court has handed down a decision that will make the sickest people in the state suffer more. The ruling applies to caregivers. Those who provide medical marijuana to a patient must also provide other assistance, such as housing and medical aid, or they can be prosecuted as drug dealers. No longer can a “care provider” just grow the pot—a skill most aging spouses, mothers, or brothers generally don’t have.
The people who need someone else to grow pot for them are the people clinging to life with AIDS, cancer patients struggling to survive chemotherapy, and folks with MS and other miserable, crippling conditions trying to find a bit of relief. They’re too sick to cultivate a garden. Have you ever tried growing a garden? Imagine trying it from your deathbed. (Most folks with less severe conditions treated by medical marijuana, such as guys with bad backs and women with fibromyalgia, don’t need someone else to grow their pot for them.) Under the new rules, these sickest patients would have to yank themselves out of their hospital and hospice beds to go to a medical marijuana dispensary. But since they are too sick to run errands, many of them won’t get the medication to cut the nausea of chemo, reverse the wasting syndrome of AIDS, and calm intractable nerve pain. Nice work, California court.
Drugs have won the war on drugs.
I’m sick of everyone always blaming the courts when some decision or other goes against them. The courts are interpreting the law, so often these poor decisions are a direct result of poorly written laws. Blame the fucking lawmakers for a change! I’m no expert on the California medical marijuana laws, but presumably if the question turned on the definition of caregivers, then there’s something about how only caregivers can distribute medical marijuana in the law as it was written. This is, as you rightly suggest, retarded, given the definition of caregiver adopted by the court (which is, I think we can agree, at least a reasonable definition). So this isn’t the Court’s fault – it’s the lawmaker’s.
I don’t really subscribe to the constructivist, conservative view that judges should strictly interpret the law by looking exclusively at the text of the law (and possibly the intent of the lawmakers), but the text of the law is still kinda important.
You really scared me with your California-Supreme-Court-decision-handing-down post.
Don’t do that!
WTF has happened to California??
What the hell are you talking about? All this says, as I’m reading it, is that the people who are handing out pot should do something in addition, like change bedding. That doesn’t mean the people taking the pot need to get it themselves. Jesus.
@ 5) I don’t think changing the bedding qualifies as medical aid under this ruling. According to the court record, the care provider must have “consistently assumed responsibility for the [patient’s] housing, health, or safety” at the time he or she began furnishing the marijuana. This suggest a long-term, caregiver role–usually designated to family members who don’t know how to grow pot. Furthermore, by restricting the caregiver role to people who aren’t already growing pot–rather than a pot grower who has it ready–a patient would have to wait for months before the first harvest. The sickest of patients will die waiting for the first puff.
not only that, dominic @6, growing QUALITY pot is a kind of expert’s job. any schmo can grow a pot plant in a sunny window (never mind that that opens you up to a host of problems with neighbors and thieving teenagers), but it wouldn’t be all that good. i’ve seen what goes into growing good pot, and it’s a science.