HOUSE BILL HARVESTS CONVICTIONS FOR SEEDS, STEMS

What are we paying the police for? For one thing, picking seeds and stems
out of marijuana so drug dealers and users might get lesser sentences.

Does that tick you off? Well, the cops aren’t too happy about it, either.

Under current Virginia law, marijuana seeds and stems don’t count toward
the legal weight of the drug confiscated by police. That means that police
have to sift through marijuana with heavy-gauge steel screens to purify it,
a time-consuming process that can take hours.

It can also mean the difference between a felony or misdemeanor for
suspects charged with possession or distribution of marijuana if the drug
weighs about a half-ounce before the seeds and stems are taken out.

Del. Donald McEachin, D-Henrico County, introduced a bill in last year’s
General Assembly to include seeds and stems in the legal definition of
marijuana. That bill passed the House but stalled in the Senate amid
questions of increasing costs to localities for incarcerating more drug
prisoners, but McEachin plans to introduce a revamped version of the bill
this year.

McEachin says his concern is that the law gives marijuana users an unfair
advantage over users of other drugs such as cocaine, which are weighed
without considering impurities. He compares it to the stiffer federal
sentences for crack cocaine vs. powder cocaine, which some have charged
amounts to racism.

Henrico Police Investigator Stokes McCune, who has demonstrated the
marijuana-sifting process for the General Assembly, says if a marijuana
dealer sells five pounds of marijuana to a customer seeds and all, then
they should be charged for possessing or selling the same amount.

As for sifting the seeds and stems, McCune says, “It’s just a tedious
process that the guys have to go through and it doesn’t do anybody any good
except the guy who’s caught with the dope.”