A victory for medical marijuana in Ohio

Here, (out of the MAP archives), is a fabulous article from Cincinnati City Beat about medical marijuana. It's really comprehensive so it's on the long side but worth the time to read in full.

It tells the story of Dee Dee Zoretic, a young mother with a debilitating chronic pain condition and how she found relief through medical marijuana after having been denied pharmaceutical relief on account of the DEA's war on pain doctors. She was arrested at one point but the outcome of her case is heartening.

One particularly interesting section is on the dunderheaded convictions that fill our prisons with innocent victims of prohibition under the ever burgeoning list of "drug crimes." You wonder why there's more women in jail now? Here's your answer.

. Brenda Prather of New York was sentenced to 40 years to life in prison for handing her husband a roll of aluminum foil that he later used in a drug related crime -- even though she was unaware of the crime, according to her husband's testimony.

. Leah Bundy, 21, also of New York, was in her boyfriend's apartment when it was raided. She was arrested and convicted of possession, despite the fact that she had no idea what her boyfriend was up to. She was sentenced to 15 years to life because of a presumed control over the area in which contraband was found.

. In an Oklahoma case, a woman attempted to deter her son from growing marijuana on her property. She used weed killer, destroyed seeds she found and said she'd throw him out if he continued. Yet her home was seized because she didn't alert the police or evict her son.

In other cases, courts have presumed married women had knowledge of and consent to the presence of their husbands' drugs because of the intimate nature of the marital relationship, making it virtually impossible to prove a lack of knowledge when living with a spouse.

Like husbands don't successfully hide things from their wives all the time. Hell, I knew my first husband had a drinking problem but I never knew the extent of it until he quit for a while and filled an industrial size waste bin with the empties he had hidden in the rafters of the basement. And he worked from home.

Dee Dee had good counsel and a great judge and although her lawyer advised her to move to a medical marijuana friendly state when her case concluded, she's going to stay put and fight.

"The longer we let it go on, the harder it's going to be to stop," she says. "That's why I say you've got to clean up your own back yard before you complain about your neighbor's, and right now Ohio has a filthy yard. I'm not going to run from my problems. I'm going to make things right here. As far as I'm concerned, this is a country of the people, by the people, for the people. Which means this is my country and they can't have it."

Good for her. That's the spirit that's going to win against this war on some drugs.