California State Appellate Court Rules That Concentrates Count as Medical Marijuana
An important state titled court decision was just released that may have just set a major influence in how California marijuana law will view concentrated forms of THC.
Until now, hash makers and enthusiast alike felt as though they were working in a very, very grey area of California’s 18-year old medical pot laws. But on Wednesday of the week before december 26th, one man’s day in court gave Cali’s cannabis lovers a rare occasion to back.
Back in 2013, a 22-year old named Sean Mulcrevy was dealing with probation and was finally searched by a Cameron Park sheriff’s deputy. Even though he gave a valid medical practitioners reference for medical cannabis which he used to help aid acid reflux and migraine headaches, and even though the amount of marijuana discovered on him during the investigation was laughably low, the dude had wax, and the wax did him in.
To clear the air, Mulcrevy was busted with a only 3.3 grams of weed, and then…please try not to smirk, .16 grams of “honey oil” and .5 grams of “dabs”. I guess there is a difference, but really it made no difference as he was charged with
the misdemeanor offense of “unlawful possession of concentrated cannabis”.
Since he was dealing with probation already, the bullshit misdemeanor landed Mulcrevy in front of El Dorado Superior Court Judge James R. Wagoner. Judge Wagoner brushed off Mulcrevy’s medical cannabis recommendation from his doctor and blew off the fact that everything discovered on him during the investigation was bought legally through a local medical cannabis dispensary.
Instead he found Mulcrevy to be in violation of his probation and slapped an additional two years onto the end of it. In his decision, Judge Wagoner acknowledged California’s Compassionate Use Act, but incorrectly insisted that it had never referenced concentrated forms of marijuana.
So Mulcrevy appealed, and justifiably so.
He took his case to the state titled court in Sacramento, and it was there the week before december 26th a unanimous 3-judge panel agreed that Judge Wagoner ruled incorrectly in Mulcrevy’s case. Their result will very likely be the foundation for the defense and normalization of marijuana concentrates in California, and possibly expand in the years to come.
The judges confess that “marijuana” and “concentrated cannabis” are not literally defined in the 1996 Compassionate Use Act, but that those definitions are unspoken throughout the law.
For example, weed is referred to as “all parts of the plant Cannabis sativa L.,whether growing or not; the seeds thereof; the resin extracted from any part of the plant; and every compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation of the plant, its seeds or resin”.
The panel defined that by not allowing Mulcrevy to utilize the Compassionate Use Act to fight in his defense against the paltry possession charges, Judge Wagoner had denied him a fair trial. As such, the new ruling reversed Wagoner’s faulty decision and so now, after two years of fighting the system, an innocent man can avoid losing two more.
But by progressing in the battle he did, Mulcrevy persuaded the state of California that concentrated forms of marijuana are now by law a form of medical cannabis.
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