Question of the week: Can Green Harvest helicopter pilots tell the difference between a medical marijuana plant and a commercial pakalolo plant? Answer: No one knows yet. But sometimes I wonder about the timing of things in the universe, or
Question of the week: Can Green Harvest helicopter pilots tell the difference
between a medical marijuana plant and a commercial pakalolo plant?
Answer:
No one knows yet. But sometimes I wonder about the timing of things in the
universe, or in this particular case, the timing of different levels of
government functioning in Hawai’i.
On Tuesday, the state Senate approved a
medical marijuana bill. A day later, the Kaua’i County Council accepted
$146,000 in federal and state funds for the Domestic Cannabis Eradication and
Suppression Program.
The medical marijuana bill says seriously ill people
can grow their own pot plants in their backyard for their own consumption to
ease their suffering.
The eradication program’s goal is to seize and
destroy as many of these plants as possible.
The $146,000 goes mostly
towards helicopter fees used in the Green Harvest operations on island. The
latest harvest two months ago yielded about 2,000 plants, according to Kaua’i
Police Chief George Frietas.
How are these two things going to jibe?
Sure pakalolo growers hiding out up in the Kaua’i hinterland are a lot
different than cancer patients growing a few ounces worth of the stuff in their
backyards.
But, without proper instructions to local police —not to
mention the fact that the acquisition of marijuana is still illegal under
federal law—these patients can come under the same fire.
Will registered
grower/users be given a special banner to fly near their pot, which reads:
“Don’t land here, legally grown (er, at least in the state of Hawai’i, but not
in the United States)”?
Burned into my mind is that famous
“screaming-Elian-in-the-closet” picture —taken by an AP photographer at the
moment Elian Gonzalez, in the arms of his rescuer, Donato Dalrymple, was
discovered by a heavily armed federal agent in a pre-dawn raid on Elian’s
relatives’ house in Miami Sunday.
Now I can see a similar picture taking
shape here in Hawai’i, only Dalrymple—the ubiquitous Fisherman—is a sickly
grandmother and little Elian is an about-to-be-confiscated pot
plant.
Sickly grandmothers are not your typical pot smokers. And most
non-medical pot smokers are not the type of villain demonized into crazed
fiends in polite society and depicted in anti-drug propaganda films such as
“Refer Madness.” This I think everyone understands.
But what we have here
is a case of where the law is the law is not the law.
Chief Freitas says
that his department has not received any sort of prepping on how to handle this
tricky case of one group of exempted pot smokers.
“The concerns have been,
what are the logistics going to be, and how is this thing going to work, and I
don’t think those questions have been answered,” he says.
I must stop
right here and say I for one support the bill wholeheartedly. I have not felt
the kind of pain a terminally ill or dying person goes through minute by
minute, hour by hour. Give them whatever they need, I say.
I do think it
is admirable that the state Legislature made such a bold move as passing this
bill, thereby sending a strong message to the feds that medical marijuana
should be regulated by the FDA.
U.S. Attorney Steve Alm has stated that he
will not use the list of registered users’ names to hunt down those who use
medical marijuana, but that doesn’t necessarily mean these frail, sick people
will be safe from abuse.
The bill has no provision about where the “legal”
smokers will get their pot seeds or plants from, thus forcing them to go to the
street or to those shotgun-toting pakalolo growers in the toolies for their
supply.
“We still don’t understand how you are going to go through the
process of obtaining an item that is illegal. How does that step occur?”
Frietas says.
The bill only makes provisions after these people are
arrested that their pot and attending paraphernalia should be returned to them
(although it doesn’t require the police to water and feed the plants while in
their possession).
That’s only after they’ve suffered through the trauma
of arrest.
Our lawgivers say they are gallantly joining the fight to
legalize the use of marijuana for medical purposes for the “health and welfare
of (Hawai’i’s) citizens,” but it’s these sickly patients suffering from such
debilitating illnesses as cancer, glaucoma, AIDS, multiple sclerosis and so on
who are on the front line of that fight.
Now if the senators came up with
the idea of using the yield from the Green Harvest to go towards medical
marijuana use, that would be something.
The only thing that could top that
would be the senators themselves offering to grow that particular leafy medical
requisite for the sick and dying and thereby risk a knock on their own
doors.
