US CA: 'Medical' Mike's Home Raided

[ReformMaryJaneLaws]

US CA: 'Medical' Mike's Home Raided

URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v03.n1463.a05.html
Newshawk: California's DPR Forum http://www.drugsense.org/dpfca


Pubdate: Thu, 25 Sep 2003
Source: Paradise Post (CA)
Copyright: 2003 Paradise Post
Contact: newsroom@paradisepost.com
Website: http://www.paradisepost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3112
Author: Laura Smith, Assistant managing editor
Photo: Paradise resident Mike Nelson discusses Tuesday's raid on his backyard marijuana garden by the Butte Interagency Task Force that reduced him to 18 plants. Below, planters used to house marijuana lay empty after, according to Nelson, task force agents removed and confiscated the plants inside them. Photo by Nick Baker, The Post http://www.mapinc.org/images/MedicalMike.jpg


'MEDICAL' MIKE'S HOME RAIDED

Talk about a buzzkill.

County drug task force agents raided the Paradise home of a medical marijuana advocate Tuesday after receiving complaints from "Medi-cal" Mike Nelson's neighbors that he was providing marijuana for less-than-medical reasons.

And even while the agents uprooted and confiscated 62 marijuana plants from Nelson's yard and garage, they left him with 18 bushy marijuana plants tall enough to be seen growing two feet above his fence.

But that the drug agents didn't take all his "medicine" is little consolation for Nelson, who's 41.

He's sick with active hepatitis C and often in pain from degenerative disk disease, and said that even the 18 large plants he's left with won't yield enough marijuana for him.

"I smoke a lot of pot," he said, drawing out the vowels in 'a lot.' "I'm sick, and that's all that I can do."

Butte Interagency Task Force Commander Vic Lacey said his team arrived at Nelson's house Tuesday morning to perform a probation search of the Peck Lane home.

Nelson, who's on searchable probation for a DUI conviction, wasn't home at the time, but his girlfriend of three years, Michelle "Rusty" Crossley let them in.

The agents found 43 mature marijuana plants growing under artificial lights in Nelson's garage and thirty more growing outside.

Scattered about the home, said Lacey said, were several stashes of dried marijuana and a small amount of hashish.

Crossley, 35, holds a medical recommendation to use marijuana to relieve fibromyalgia.

Because Butte County guidelines for the raising of medical marijuana plants allow patients to grow up to six plants for their own use or possess up to a pound of processed marijuana, Nelson and Crossley would have been allowed to grow a total of 12 plants.

District Attorney Mike Ramsey said that Crossley claimed that part of the crop was for another medical marijuana patient, whose recommendation she couldn't find while the drug agents were at the house.

Usually, Ramsey said, he requires that caregivers have the recommendation of patients they're growing for on hand, but the agents made an exception.

"Out of an abundance of caution, they allowed ( Nelson and Crossley ) to keep enough plants for all three people," Ramsey said.

However, the "filthy and un-healthy" condition of Nelson and Crossley's home caused enough concern among the drug agents that they called Children's Services to respond for an investigation.

Crossley's three children -- a son, age 17, and two daughters, ages 15 and 12, were at school at the time of the raid.

Lacey said a Children's Services social worker interviewed the kids at school.

While they weren't removed from the home, the agency is investigating the living arrangements.

Crossley said that's what she's most worried about.

She claims to have never been in trouble with law enforcement before, and that she only started smoking marijuana with Nelson, to relieve her chronic pain.

Blind in one eye, she's on Social Security and disability and worries about her kids. They've never been in trouble before, she said.

"I'm a very good mom," she said. "Nothing is more important to me than them. They tell me everything. ... They don't use drugs."

Tuesday's raid seems to have knocked the proverbial wind out of Nelson. Usually a firebrand spokesman for the legalization of marijuana and the unfettered use of medical marijuana, he sat quietly asking questions in his garden Wednesday, near tears.

When asked why he was growing so many plants when he knew the county's medical marijuana cultivation guidelines, he said he was trying to hybridize a powerful form of the plant and had been experimenting with many different strains. He worries now about going to jail.

"I'm not a drug dealer," he said. "I'm giving people the help they need. People who are dying, with cancer, like your grandmother."



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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake