Police Defend Patient’s Outdoor Medical Marijuana
(Oregon) - With a doctor’s prescription and a little backyard space you can turn your backyard into a medicinal garden providing patients with medicine. Here is something I found this morning regarding a patient having to protect and defend himself against people trying to stop him from growing his own natural and 100% legal medicinal cannabis.
Stephen Vinzant says he has been growing marijuana at his residence legally for three years and has a state-issued medical marijuana card to prove it.
His next-door neighbors — who run a counseling center for recovering drug addicts — are not impressed.
Their differences will get a public airing Monday when Phoenix Counseling Center owner Keziah Hinchen will attempt to convince City Council members that they should put an end to Vinzant’s outdoor pot crop.
Hinchen plans a presentation to the council outlining the difficulty of assisting people with substance abuse issues while a “fresh crop is growing right next door.”
Vinzant said he moved to the property three years ago, at which time he began growing the state-allowed crop of 12 mature plants and 36 immature plants.
Half of the plants are for Vinzant’s mother, who suffers from chronic restless leg syndrome and the other half are for Vinzant, a Vietnam-era vet who said he suffers from post-traumatic stress, a bad back and arthritis.
During the past two growing seasons, Vinzant said, “no one squawked about anything.”
Then the treatment center changed ownership, a client discovered the plants during last year’s harvest and, Vinzant said, “totally freaked out.”
Hinchen said the counseling center serves as an extended campus for local schools by providing services to adolescents with substance abuse issues “and something like 85 to 95 percent of them have issues with marijuana.”
“So here’s this guy and he’s got this great big marijuana garden in his backyard,” Hinchen said. “The plants are 20 feet away from the fence — 20 feet away from people who have addiction issues. When it starts getting ripe, you can smell it. So here we’re saying, ‘Stay away from marijuana’ and here it is. They smell it, they see it . . . it’s right there!”
The problem with the above way of thinking is that just because medicinal marijuana is there, does not mean they should show no control and forget about it. Alcoholics enter grocery stores all day long and alcohol is available everywhere that ex-drinkers frequent. Marijuana is medicine, these people cannot stop a patient who is within his legal rights and within state law from gowing his own medicinal cannabis. He even built a cage around the plants and there are fences and locks in place!
And the local police agree with me, he is within his rights and state law…
Jackson County sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Rick Valentine said state laws regarding medical marijuana use are tricky to navigate.
“I don’t know of anything in the statutes that prohibits having a medical marijuana grower next to a rehabilitation center,” he said.
“We’ve had calls where people complained about their neighbor growing medical marijuana but they’re within state law.”
And this is exactly the reason we need safe access to medicinal marijuana and regulation - to not only protect patients and users, but those citizens who live next door to patients, as well as, the officers who are caught in this drug war that is plagueing and destroying our society. Marijuana is medicine and not the evil “street drug” it has been made out to be, by forcing it underground and into the hands of the drug czars.
Patients should never be required to turn to the black market for medicine, the same way anxiety, depression, pain medicine is prescribed to Americans every day… marijuana should be available to anyone who needs it. Especially Migraine sufferers who suffer daily pain and anxiety regarding when and if an attack will occur and cause nausea at the workplace and interfering with work hours the way it has me for decades.