I’ve been following news about the cannabis world for almost 14 years and I’ve been writing about it for about ten years. Every now and then a story will get so much traction that I will see it in various forms in my news and social media feeds dozens of times.
The latest of these is the hysteria that has sprung up around the “problem” law enforcement is having with marijuana cases due to the legalization of hemp on the federal and state levels. I addressed the issue a couple of weeks ago, but the “problem” is apparently growing and threatens to destroy of criminal justice system as we know it.
Texas, Florida, Ohio, Tennessee and Georgia are just some of the states where police and prosecutors are wrestling with either a lack of technology to test a substance to see if it is marijuana or hemp, or an extreme expense to do so. As a result, many people charged with marijuana offenses are seeing their charges dropped.
Officials across the country are scrambling to order testing equipment at massive taxpayer expense (estimates in Texas put the total at $10 million +). All because they want to be able to make sure a substance is illegal marijuana and not legal hemp, so the person possessing the marijuana can then be run through the justice system.
I, for one, hope that as many marijuana charges as possible are dropped as a result of hemp legalization. I hope there are massive delays in getting the needed testing equipment, like maybe the requisition forms get rerouted to Iceland. This notion that people not being arrested and charged for marijuana possession is somehow doing damage to society is laughable at best and dangerously absurd at worst.
No one should ever be criminalized for marijuana possession. So if I mock those who think this is an actual problem deserving of weeks upon weeks of coverage in the media, maybe you can forgive me. Or maybe you can’t, I really don’t care.
I don’t care if police and district attorneys have to find actual criminals to lock up and prosecute because the crime lab can’t test the THC levels in some plant matter. I hear there are still rape kits that haven’t been tested yet…maybe we could focus some on those?
No? States are instead going to spend millions making sure they have enough hemp tests? Seems stupid to me, but I’m just some weed blogger.
Marijuana is actually derived from cannabis, but is federally misconstrued to mean cannabis.
Hemp actually refers to the fibers of cannabis, but is federally misconstrued to be a type of cannabis based on THC content.
Marijuana is in Schedule 1, hemp is descheduled.
THC in marijuana is in Schedule 1, THC in Marinol is in Schedule 3, THC in hemp is descheduled.
If you extract the descheduled THC from hemp into a bottle with sesame seed oil, does it becomes Schedule 1 THC, Schedule 3 THC, or remain descheduled?
This shows how the Schedules are being misused in an “unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious” way, just like the DEA’s Chief Administrative Law Judge reproved in 1988.
The judge also wrote, “Marijuana in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.”
He was disallowed from writing the clarifying explanation, “Marijuana in its natural form is identified by law as the plant Cannabis sativa L., which often contains considerable amounts of THC, one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. Cannabis in its smoked form is known as marijuana.”
The clarification can also be manifested by reconstructing the malformed federal definition of marijuana to clearly describe how marijuana is actually derived from cannabis, and carefully deschedule cannabis to refresh the rights of States and citizens to control cannabis in conformance with the 2nd, 9th, 10th, and 14th Amendments, like this:
The term “marijuana” means all parts of the smoke produced by the combustion of the plant Cannabis sativa L., which is, as are the viable seeds of such plant, prohibited to be grown by or sold by any publicly traded corporation or subsidiary company, and such smoke is prohibited to be inhaled by any child or by any person bearing any firearm, as is the intake of any part or any product of such plant containing more than 0.3% THC by weight unless prescribed to such child by an authorized medical practitioner.
Let’s contact our members of Congress about reconstructing the definition of marijuana to uphold our U.S. Constitution, so marijuana itself can then be removed from Schedule 1.