The trial against medical marijuana patient Bruce Olson in Kitsap County has gotten underway this week. The Cannabis Defense Coalition (a group that I work with) has been posting daily roundups from the courtroom. Olson and his wife Pam were arrested after members of the WestNET drug task force raided their home in 2007 and found 48 marijuana plants. Both Bruce and Pam are authorized by a physician to be medical marijuana patients.
Some interesting items from those dispatches:
– The prosecutors have been threatening defense witnesses with prosecution in order to keep them from testifying, including Bruce’s wife Pam, who was already tried and convicted last year of the very same crime (manufacturing marijuana with the intent to deliver).
– Earlier today (Wednesday), the jury pool was sent home because the prosecutor convinced the judge that the potential jurors were “tainted” after seeing a protester outside the courtroom holding a “Stop Arresting Medical Marijuana Patients” sign. This delayed the trial for a day.
I also heard that some local reporters have been on hand, so hopefully we’ll get some more complete news coverage from this gigantic mess. As always, if you’re free to attend and show your support for Bruce, you can find the court schedule at the bottom of this post.
48 plants?? Were they growing under lights? Let’s assume half of these plants were starts. That’s still 24 plants per crop. At two ounces yield per plant, that’s still 48 ounces per crop, or three pounds. Three crops a year – 9 pounds of bud or 144 ounces a year. $300 per ounce – that’s over $43 grand a year in bud. You might want to clarify. What were they really up to with this growing effort?
Hey, Steve, you want to add up what the pharmaceutical companies make on the drugs that marijuana seems to do a good job of replacing
Being a person who has profession experience in growing potted flowers and plants, both floral and food but nothing medicinal or under lights, I can say you have a problem with forgetting pots and potting soil, fertilizer (expensive liquid is the best). Plus with marijuana under lights there is a heavy consumption of pricey energy.
From what I’ve read in reports of police raids on marijuana growers the plants don’t grow under just any lights, but with light so strong that their presence can be detected outside a house with pretty simple heat sensors even if the windows are covered.
Just trying to keep the lights and refrigerator on, and watch a few hours of TV a night at our house costs at least a hundred a month. I can’t imagine the bills of those places the police call ‘pot houses’. In fact I even recall now that another way they find them is to check the electrical use of homes in town and look for huge spikes in power consumption.
I don’t know what your purpose is, maybe you’re a drug company lobbyist, but leaving such a glaring hole in your argument shows you’re not exactly wedded to making a balanced case.
@1
You might want to clarify. What were they really up to with this growing effort?
Why don’t you tell me? The prosecution is introducing a witness by the name of Mr. Kenny, who claims to have bought marijuana from Mr. Olson. He has some fairly big holes in his story though. Other than him, I’m not aware of a single person who is ready to say that the Olson’s were selling to non-patients. And as far as I’m concerned, they should be protected if they were growing for other patients. The law simply wasn’t clear enough in 2007 (it’s only somewhat better now).
And even if they were selling to non-medical users, at least that’s money not turning Mexico into a charred hellscape right now. Is it really worth it to have a two year prosecution over someone who might be making a couple thousand bucks a year? Really? Is that a smart outlay of taxpayer funds?
I can get information on this trial at HA but not the local paper, the Kitsap Sun.
Hmmm.
@2
No our Steve is a user of illegal drugs.
Just read all of his posts.
@5
Sorry, I’ve read all of Steve’s posts and I’ve read all of yours, and you’re clearly the one with the drug problem.
@6 Sorry the truth is you can’t read and if by chance you could you wouldn’t get the story right the first or the tenth read.
@7
I rest my case.
@2 I’ve grown a few plants in my time. I also bought a house for a friend, who was ill following a double organ transplant. I bought it so he could live out his life there and also have a place to grow the pot he needed to feel better and, of course, he also made a chunk of change selling the stuff. Hell, he’d been a dealer for over 40 years and was one of the founders of the Thundering Herd, the notorious old Rat City gang. He grew what is now called “G-13”, a strain developed by the UW for the government that had reached the underground through a DFH working at a lab in Lousiana.
Look at it this way. The lamp used is usually a 1000W metal halide with a special color rendition more suitable for growers than regular metal halides used for buildings and parking lots. To get the total fixture input watts you’d have to add the ballast wattage, but for conversation purposes we can round it off to 1000W, or 1 KW.
If you have four lamps in your garage or basement, when all are burning you’re consuming 4 KWH. Round the rate to 8 cents per KWH and it’s costing you 32 cents per hour. Burn the lamps for 18 hours a day during the grow cycle and that’s $5.76 per day. A 45 day grow cycle comes to $260. A 56 day, 12-hour bud cycle would be $215, or a total of $475. Now consider that a 4′ baseboard heater at 250W per linear foot is 1000W. You can also think of the lamp as a heater, one that puts out light. Look at it this way. If you set your grow room up cleverly, you can heat your home with the waste heat by controlling how and where the heat loss occurs.
As for miscellaneous stuff, for pots many growers use 5 gallon buckets that can be obtained cheap or even for free. The soil they use costs about $10 per pot, or $360 for 36 pots, which is 9 plants per light. The 20-20-20, 10-30-20 and 5-50-17 fertilizer costs about $20 per crop. All this comes to less than $400.
Add it up and your expenses come to less than $900 for a 4-light crop that might yield 85 ounces of bud. Three of those ounces can pay for all expenses. 82 ounces left over with a street value of $300/oz or $24,600.
Geez, no wonder people grow this stuff. That’s a lot of, er, um, medicine.
@3 I know how much money can be made from a small growing operation. I also understand the risks involved. If these people are shown to have grown and sold for profit then they are in trouble on several fronts. The IRS will be next. That’s just the way it is.
We’ve discussed this before and you know that I tend to look beyond the medicinal needs of people who need this drug although I’m not unsympathetic. I simply find the prohibition to be unacceptable. For me it’s primarily a question of personal liberty and freedom and a runamuck government intent on taking it away from us. Whether one partakes in the smoke or not, all should take note of any freedom taken from us by our government.
Whatever it takes, whether it’s for tax revenue, the plight of the ill, or simply the issue of personal freedom, these laws must change. Other than perhaps a tax liability, the Olsons should be free. Hell, we all should be free.
Why is the prosecutor using so many BS tactics? Is the case shit? Were they told to try this case no matter what? Funny how right wing prosecutors make every effort to send cases that limit personal freedoms and support governmental growth (DEA) to trial. Republicans = individual rights small government. BS
I do enjoy Lee’s claim that growing marijuana is patriotic!
Rather than holding this case out as an example of victimization, it might be useful for Lee to say more about what he knows or does not know about Bruce Olson.
If it turns out Mr. O was using this as a cover for breaking the law, then he is hurting the very cause of those who have real reasons to want pot for medical use.
I’ll say it yet again: marijuana should never have been made illegal in the first place. If society can’t handle a naturally-growing weed, then it’s too fragile to survive.
@13 I suspect we all agree ,,, although “naturally-growing-weeds” also contain some extremely dangerous things that you really do not want freely circulated.
OTOH, when Lee conflates words like “patient” or “medical” with the issue of someone charged with growing marijuana illegally he is doing exactly what the opponents of med mari claimed would happen, greasing the slippery slope.
Back at Mr. O, if he was growing MJ illegally, then he has the same rights that Martin Luther King had when he broke the law. If going to jail is done to prove something important, as certainly is the case if your think the freedom to use pot is important, then it seems to me that the argument becomes Olson’s freedom to grow and smoke something harmless rather than whether he is being persecuted because he is ill and needs MJ.
@10 steve
The concept of medical marijuana is rather overdone. There is no reason people ought not to be able to benefit from anything useful … whether that is marijuana or arch supports. OTOH, for the most part no one has found any compelling, life saving need for marijuana.
The real issue is the antiscientific exaggeration of anything harmful about the stuff. The guv could make a buck out of the legal sales.
SJ,
It might be that marijuana should be made legal so people could have the individual right to enjoy its intoxicating effects. That’s my point: people should be allowed to indulge in marijuana if they choose to do so. It’s none of the government’s business what people do in the privacy of their homes when it comes to marijuana use.
I’m struggling to determine the benefit to society that comes from locking this guy up.
Simply screaming “it’s illegal!” is circular reasoning – why *should* it be illegal?