Medical Marijuana Payback Burns Colorado Police
Jeanwah
Posts: 6,363
The Cops finally get theirs!!
http://www.safeaccessnow.org/article.php?id=5387Medical Marijuana Payback Burns Colorado Police
Aurora Pot Grower Blazes New Legal Trail
by Emil Steiner, Washington Post
January 8th, 2008
Policing pot in Colorado is about to get a lot more complicated. The kick-in-the-door raids SWAT teams have long employed could now cost cities hundreds of thousands of dollars following two landmark court decisions upholding the state's constitutional protection of medical marijuana. Under the rulings, police departments are required to return any marijuana and paraphernalia taken from state-sanctioned growers, and can be sued by those growers if the crops aren't preserved.
The largest case thus far involves Kevin Dickes, who intends to sue the Denver suburb of Aurora for over $360,000 in pot damages. It comes less than a month after a judge ordered the return of an estimated $200,000 of medical marijuana to a couple in Fort Collins.
Dickes, a 38-year-old Desert Shield Marine who suffers from debilitating pain after catching grenade shrapnel in the Gulf, says he was treated worse by Colorado police than by anyone in Iraq. In April, 2007 officers raided his home after receiving a tip from a neighbor and, according to his lawyer Robert J. Corry Jr., threw the disabled veteran to the ground, held him at gunpoint and ransacked his home. They found 71 marijuana plants, at least 65 of which they confiscated illegally, and they charged Dickes with felony cultivation. After eight months of legal wrangling, the Arapahoe County district attorney dismissed the charges, determining that Dickes was in fact a certified grower. But, by then, his plants were long dead.
Thanks to a referendum passed in 2000, Article XVIII, Section 14 of the Colorado State Constitution stipulates that "any property... used in connection with the medical use of marijuana... shall not be harmed, neglected, injured, or destroyed while in the possession of state or local law enforcement officials." Not being equipped with the growroom or know-how to maintain them, Aurora police simply uprooted the plants and threw them in the evidence room. Det. Shannon Lucy, an Aurora police spokesperson, illustrated her department's cultivation ignorance, explaining that they kept only the leaves, which she called the "only thing of value," not the buds in which most of the active ingredient, THC, resides....
Post edited by Unknown User on
0
Comments
*~You're IT Bert!~*
Hold on to the thread
The currents will shift
That's really nice govt indeed...
watch out kids it's Reefer MADNESS!
big Pharma's gonna be grown out of business.
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
http://i36.tinypic.com/66j31x.jpg
(\__/)
( o.O)
(")_(")
naděje umírá poslední
'Pot damages'. I love it!
Where was she back when we used to grow? We would burn our leaves.
I know what you mean
~Ralph Waldo Emerson~
The Tie-Dye Lady is HOT!!!
you mean detective work to be at the scene before the crime takes place instead of eating donuts on the scene of the crime after its happened?????
BRILLIANT!
but if the feds raided him, it would be totally legal for them to bust him.
wait now im confused.
The marijuana people would to well to start pushing the 10th amendment on the imperial federal government when that happens.
It's not really legal, but they have bigger guns.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."