A Useless Majority

As a supporter of drug policy reform, a lot of people will tell me that - even though Democrats don't talk about drug policy - they will move forward on this issue once they have majorities. Well, we have a massive majority of Democrats in the state legislature and a Democrat in the Governor's mansion, but we still can't even put teeth into the drug reforms that we've already passed. Dominic Holden has a full recap in The Stranger of last week's incident in Kent, where police returned a frightened 8-year-old to her parents after being stranded in the mountains when the vehicle they were riding in crushed her grandfather after breaking down. But instead of reuniting her, they arrested her parents despite them being legal medical marijuana patients.

So why would Washington State Patrol officers bust a legal medical-marijuana garden to make a case that—unless there is evidence of a meth lab or illegal weapons—probably won't stand up in court.

The couple's defense attorney, Douglas Hiatt, thinks officers did it simply because they could. "The medical-marijuana law has no arrest protection and only an affirmative defense," he says. That defense can only be raised once a defendant goes to court, so the WSP officers apparently harassed the grief-stricken family on a technicality—busting the couple by any loophole necessary. The zealousness to bust pot growers is characteristic of the entire state patrol, which manages a toll-free hotline to anonymously report marijuana growers and rewards informants with a whopping $5,000.

Lt. Sass brazenly told KING-5 TV that officers could get away with it: "That's a horrific thing to have happen, but because of that doesn't mean we cannot continue the investigation that came out of a bad situation." Risk of negative press about officers' egregious enforcement from mainstream media outlets wouldn't have been a looming threat, either. The Seattle Times, which hasn't covered this story, ran a front-page feature one week earlier glorifying efforts of law enforcement to bust pot growers—stories about the collateral damage from those busts apparently present an editorial conflict.

Fixing this ambiguity in the medical marijuana law should have been a slam dunk for these guys. How hard is it to just make it illegal for police not to violate a voter-approved law?