POLICE WENT TOO FAR IN BUSTING MARIJUANA-USING PATIENT

Police overreacted in raiding a New Vineyard home.

On Election Day voters were asked if they “want to allow patients with
specific illnesses to grow and use small amounts of marijuana for treatment,
as long as such is approved by a doctor.”

By majority rule, the referendum question passed.

It passed because Mainers believe that medical marijuana has a place here.
And, yet, last week a 62-year-old New Vineyard man suffering from muscular
dystrophy — a member of the town’s Planning Board — was arrested for storing
and growing marijuana that his doctor recommended for him.

A dozen officers from the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department, Maine Drug
Enforcement Agency and the U.S. Border Patrol, backed up by a military
helicopter, discovered between two to four pounds of processed marijuana and
83 plants in various state of maturation and confiscated everything. Police
even took prescription drugs Leonard Ellis used to treat his illness.

A week after the raid Ellis was rushed to a hospital in Waterville because
he was having difficulty breathing and was admitted for treatment. Ellis
believes his turn for the worse is because he no longer has access to the
marijuana he had used nightly to bring on sleep.

But police defend their actions because Ellis violated the legal limit for
medicinal marijuana and didn’t have a proper physician’s prescription for
the weed, just a doctor’s note recommending its use.

He certainly violated Maine law, but the real question here is not who is
right and who is wrong. The question is, how much effort should police be
putting into confiscating medicinal marijuana — even in great supply — from
chronically or terminally ill people who pose no real threat to the general
population?

According to the family, police never called Ellis to suggest that he was
storing or growing more than is legally acceptable. They just showed up in
his dooryard with a search warrant in hand.

If police had Ellis under surveillance, which they would have had to do to
warrant the kind of raid that features a helicopter and a dozen officers,
they would have known that Ellis is sick, has difficulty moving and is not
orchestrating a covert drug ring in his living room.

Police are right in believing that marijuana can be a gateway drug to
harder, more dangerous drugs. But the real danger is for young people in
good health who have their lives stretching out before them, not for the
elderly and terminally ill struggling for some relief from pain.

Maine spent a great deal of time and money organizing and implementing the
Ellis raid, not to mention the money that will be spent prosecuting him for
a misdemeanor. Police overreacted. On balance, it wasn’t the best use of
taxpayer resources.