A four-day mini-saga concluded Tuesday afternoon, as the Aspen Police Department handed over a small amount of marijuana to a local homeless state-certified medical marijuana user. They had confiscated the drug from his backpack, which he misplaced over the weekend.
On Saturday, Matthew Franzen, 48, accidentally left a backpack containing his personal effects at the Thrift Shop in Aspen. Workers at the used clothing store found the lost bag and gave it to the police.
Franzen stated he believed authorities were holding onto his marijuana because he currently has a civil lawsuit pending against a slew of local law enforcement officials — including the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office and district attorney’s office — for $150,000 in damages. The suit stems from his arrest and imprisonment on burglary charges in November 2007.
He was jailed for four months before the case against him was dropped.
Lauren Maytin, an Aspen-based criminal defense attorney who is on the Colorado board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), offered to help educate the APD on current medical marijuana law yesterday.
“It’s been on the books for more than eight years,” she said. “We respect the fact that they wanted to check it out, but [Franzen] was without his medicine for some time and that is just wrong.”
via – Aspen Daily News “Police return medical marijuana to homeless man“
