Dominic Holden has the latest on the Lifevine case. Last Friday, the DEA, at the direction of U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan, took the stolen medicine from the Seattle Police Department and now plans to destroy it. There are still no plans to charge anyone because, as everyone already knows, the person who possessed the marijuana wasn’t in violation of any laws. Curiously, the amount the DEA claims SPD turned over to them is over 3 times as much as what Martin claims was stolen. I’ll post up a follow-up if I find out more.
UPDATE: More here. The reason for the discrepancy in the amount that was seized by the DEA comes from the fact that they’re also counting the non-medicinal plant materials that were seized.
UDPATE 2: Via e-mail, Geov pointed me to a Seattle Weekly story from back when they were relevant, where U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan was quoted:
Jeff Sullivan, chief of the criminal division of the Western Washington U.S. attorney’s office, says that not one federal case has been brought against a medical marijuana operation since the law’s passage. “With limited resources, we are looking at large-scale trafficking and not medical marijuana,” Sullivan says.
As Dominic had already pointed out, this was not standard procedure for our local U.S. Attorney’s office. They acted on this in response to the attention it was getting from a public that is increasingly upset about how much the Federal government’s archaic and unfounded views on marijuana interfere with sensible local laws.