(KTVB) CALDWELL — A major pot bust on I-84 last night landed a 39-year-old Oregon man in jail, accused of felony trafficking. He was actually pulled over twice; the first time he was let go in Oregon because the suspect carried a medical marijuana card.

Idaho State Police accuse Justin Brownrigg, of Eugene, Oregon of bringing three duffel bags full of marijuana into Idaho. He was reportedly headed to Utah.

Brownrigg was first stopped by an Oregon State trooper on Wednesday. During the stop, the trooper smelled marijuana and questioned Brownrigg.

“[Brownrigg] advised and told the officer, ‘Hey, I’m a medical marijuana… and I have marijuana in the car and it’s under the prescribed amount in Oregon,” Canyon County Prosecutor Bryan Taylor said. “The Oregon State trooper under Oregon law couldn’t do anything, so he let him go.

How many times do we have to warn patients: do not flash your medical marijuana card to a cop like it’s a “Get Out of Jail Free” card.  If a cop is questioning you at a traffic stop and says he smells marijuana, the proper response is… silence.  You have that right.  Use it.  Force that cop to call in drug dogs and get a warrant and if that happens and you’re faced with arrest, you ask for your attorney and he or she can make your medical case for you.

Well, unless you’re using the medical marijuana law to hide your criminal interstate trafficking of 69 pounds of marijuana.  Then maybe you don’t want dogs around.

The Oregon trooper alerted Idaho State Police.

Hmm, so you’re telling us a cop who pulled over a citizen and found him to be obeying the law then called a cop in a neighboring state to warn him this (as far as he knew) law-abiding citizen was coming through?

Once Brownrigg was near Caldwell on I-84, an officer says they saw Brownrigg speeding and stopped the car.

By the way, the speed limit on that stretch of I-84 is 75 MPH.

Brownrigg again mentioned his medical marijuana card and having a small amount of marijuana. In Idaho, possessing any amount is illegal, so the officer searched the car.

“They ended up searching his vehicle and found 69 pounds of marijuana,” Taylor said. “You don’t carry around 69 pounds of marijuana with the plan of smoking it. You plan on selling it… Definitely not ‘medicinal.’”

This case was one of ISP’s largest seizures, though Canyon County Prosecutor Bryan Taylor says his office is seeing more and more cases of marijuana trafficking from neighboring states where medical marijuana is legal.

“In the last month we’re starting to see a major increase in this particular issue. This is the sixth offense of very large quantities of marijuana, in which individuals are coming over from Oregon, saying that they’re trying to hide under the card, under the umbrella of this medical marijuana,” Taylor said.

And this is the problem of going partway with legalization of only medical uses of marijuana.  The vast majority of people in the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program are diligently obeying the law, struggling to make do with a system that has no reasonable distribution of medicine, and genuinely using marijuana to treat serious medical conditions.

However, so long as 90% of Oregon’s pot smokers and 100% of Idaho’s and Utah’s pot smokers are criminals, there will always be a massive profit potential in hauling pounds of pot from one state to another.  No criminals with any smarts isn’t going to try to take advantage of any way he can avoid prosecution.

Just as prohibitionists see a heroin user who started on pot and declare there to be a “gateway effect”, prohibitionists see a dealer who abuses the medical marijuana law and declares all patients to be frauds.  If marijuana is legalized for all who want it and its distribution taxed and regulated, you won’t find many people driving pounds of it across state lines… except the licensed and inspected distributors of those products.

After all, when is the last time Idaho State Police stopped an Oregonian with cases of moonshine in the trunk?

Stay Low Productionz is the recording identity of one Jeremy Bradshaw from Boise, Idaho.  As a fellow Boisean, I was attracted by the name of this album, “Idaho Baked Potato Beats”.  I figure with the word “baked” there might a good weed song in there, and, sure enough, I found this tune, “Blunted”, among the selection of instrumentals from 2004-2010.  So load up a nice indica and get baked like a Radical Russett with today’s Toker Tune!

Stay Low Productionz
“Blunted” (mp3)
from “Idaho Baked Potato Beats”
(Distrophonix)

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Radical Rant

A Republicans from the state of Idaho has introduced a medical marijuana bill in the Idaho House. Rep. Tom Trail introduced HB 370 as a personal bill, in a state that does have the option of a citizen initiative. This is the second time in Idaho, and the second time for Rep. Trail to introduce a medical marijuana bill.

Last year a similar bill from Trail got an informal hearing from the House Health and Welfare Committee, but was tabled in that committee. HB 370 would allow patients with debilitating medical conditions to have up to 2 ounces of marijuana every 28 days, but it would be no-grow, meaning they would have to obtain their marijuana from a state-authorized “alternative treatment centers.”

The bill’s wording says that compassion dictates that a distinction be made between medical and non-medical uses of marijuana, and to protect from arrest, prosecution, property forfeiture, and criminal or other penalties patients who use marijuana to alleviate suffering from debilitating medical conditions, as well as their physicians, primary care givers and those who are authorized to produce marijuana for medical purposes.”

There is a group in Idaho who are currently gathering signatures for a citizens initiative to legalize medical marijuana, but Trail says that other states have shown that legislation with tight controls is preferable to a voter initiative. The House Bill 370 was introduced today and is waiting for an assignment for a committee hearing. The group collecting signatures in Idaho has no timeline yet for when they will turning in those signatures for review.

External Links:

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/jan/17/medical-marijuana-bill-introduced-idaho-house/

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Radical Rant

• There is no medical marijuana, no industrial hemp, no ganja sacrament, and no recreational pot. These is one plant – cannabis – and we must rally together to end its prohibition.

The Couer d’Alene Press has published a piece detailing plans by the Kootenai Alliance for Children and Families to oppose any efforts at crafting a medical marijuana law in the state of Idaho.

Idaho is a strongly conservative state.  It is geographically nearly surrounded by states that have approved the medical use of marijuana – Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Montana, and the entire country of Canada.  Opponents seize on this fact to paint medical marijuana as an enemy at the doorstep:

Opponents say Idaho is next. …pro-pot lobbyists have Idaho in their crosshairs.

Like dominos [sic], after neighbors Washington and Montana have legalized it, they say Idaho is the last holdout in the Pacific Northwest, ripe to be targeted.

The only pro-pot lobbyists targeting Idaho are Idahoans themselves.  When they approached MPP, DPA, and other groups with grants programs, they were turned away because the out-of-state organizations don’t see much possibility of passing anything in Idaho until the locals rise up from the grassroots.  So they have.

“There’s no such thing as medical marijuana,” said Monte Stiles, retired federal drug prosecutor, now involved in drug education programs. “It’s like saying, ‘chew up this gravel because there’s iron in it.’ It’s ridiculous.”

Well, it would be closer to saying, “chew on this willow bark because there’s acetylsalicylic acid in it.”  We needn’t explain how ridiculous Mr. Stiles’ pharmacological analysis is; we can just point him to the chief petitioner of Compassionate Idaho, Lindsey Rinehart, who battles her multiple sclerosis every day with medical marijuana.

Most pressing is the legal nightmare to which states open themselves up by legalizing it since it’s a federally banned drug. And removing the stigma of drug use like marijuana increases its use as a gateway drug too, Stiles said.

Think about what Stiles said.  If we stop stigmatizing marijuana use, more people use it.  So, the only way you can think of to reduce demand is to lie about cannabis?

States that have legalized its use, 16 as well as Washington, D.C., have noticed an increase in drug use overall in the last two years, he said.

Uh huh.  So did 34 states that didn’t legalize medical marijuana.  And over the period 2002-2003 to 2008-2009, marijuana use went down overall in every state, medical or not, except California, Colorado, and Wyoming.

These are snippets from the opening half of the piece.  The next half features response from our own Paul Armentano, then the article concludes with the anti-medical marijuana point-of-view:

“Drug use leads to more drug use,” said Kerri Wilfong, KACF director. “It’s always a cause for concern when it comes to people making good choices. When the perception is that it’s a medicine, it can be harmful because we know it is an addictive substance that has damaging effects to the body.”

So, we wouldn’t want to perceive of Oxycontin as a medicine, then, would we?  Marijuana is so less damaging to the body than the aspirin we can buy over the counter and about as addictive as coffee.  This once again points to that problem of the prohibitionists: they feel like the country would be overwhelmed by an epidemic of pot use if they were to start telling the truth about its medicinal values.  Doesn’t that beg the question: why would all these people turn to cannabis if we don’t demonize it?  We are saturated with commercials that promote alcohol drinking, an addictive substance that has damaging effects to the body, yet drinking rates have gone down over the past thirty years.

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New Jersey - The (No Medical Marijuana) Garden State - coming soon to a state near you!

In 2010, New Jersey passed the first medical marijuana law that did not allow the patient to grow their own low-cost medicine, instead requiring them to pay street prices for cannabis sold through dispensaries.

The District of Columbia followed suit when setting up their rules, despite the fact that the initiative that passed by 69% back in 1998 allowed an “exemption for cultivation [which] shall apply only to marijuana specifically grown to provide a medical supply for a patient.”

Marijuana Policy Project then wrote Arizona’s new law which forbids home cultivation if the patient lives within 25 miles of a dispensary.  The reasoning given was that the dispensaries would need to be guaranteed a clientele in order to remain viable.

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So imagine you’re a 70-year-old glaucoma patient in Phoenix living on SSI.  A friend donates to you a small closet grow and you’re producing a few ounces for yourself at about $12.50/ounce.  Next month, an entrepreneur applies for and is approved to open a dispensary 18 miles away from your rent-subsidized apartment.  Your choices are to move seven miles farther away on your fixed SSI income and keep growing or to sell your grow equipment and start buying those $300 ounces at the dispensary that you can only get to after a lengthy bus ride.  Don’t worry, nobody on the bus or at the stop in your bad neighborhood will smell the ounces of weed on you as you bring them home every couple of weeks (you’re not allowed to stock up – two ounces per fortnight only).  Because we want to be sure a place that sells marijuana in a storefront doesn’t go out of business, since marijuana is such hard commodity to market.

We at NORML had warned that continued focus on medical without an eye toward full legalization would eventually lead to a “box canyon” where opponents say, “Oh, you want medical marijuana?  All right, we’ll make it medical. You don’t grow your own Vicodin, do you?” and begin to eliminate home growing provisions, the only protection cannabis consumers have against government and/or corporate overpricing, strain degradation, and pharmaceuticalization of cannabis into pills, sprays, and inhalers that will make possession of raw plant material by patients just as criminal as it is now for non-patients.

Two current medical marijuana states, New Mexico and Montana, face efforts to outright repeal medical marijuana.  Two current medical marijuana states, Arizona and New Jersey, don’t allow for home cultivation.  Now, New Hampshire, Delaware, Idaho, Maryland, and New York have medical marijuana proposals that forbid home grows and require street-price dispensary shopping.  Proposals in Connecticut, Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia would be similar to the current thirteen medical marijuana states that allow registered home cultivation.

NORML supports all these proposals, because what kind of pro-marijuana organization could oppose protecting patients from arrest for marijuana possession, even if they had to buy it at a dispensary?  At least the dispensary is clean and safe and reliable and tested and secure compared to the streets.  But we remind all supporters of medical marijuana that only through legalization for the healthy will you ever get reasonable prices, peace of mind, and avoid the eventual box canyon the DEA and FDA want to steer you into.