Posted on 04/30/2007 2:17:03 PM PDT by microgood
She is 71 years old, a great-grandmother - hardly the type of person you would expect to see in Bronx Criminal Court to answer charges of buying two dime bags of pot.
Yet at the appointed time today, Barbara Jackson will make her way to the courthouse, a colorectal cancer survivor ready to plead her case.
"I smoke it to live," the feisty granny told the Daily News. "I don't think I should have been arrested."
Jackson said she started smoking the green, leafy drug eight years ago - a year after being diagnosed with cancer - to restore her appetite after chemotherapy and radiation treatments.
"After cancer treatments, I was very sick," she said. "I couldn't eat and could not stand the smell of food."
Even though her cancer is in remission, she lost her appetite, Jackson said.
On March 13, she set out to find some more of the illegal drug shehas grown dependent on. She found some close to her house on E.179th St. and began walking down Walton Ave.
Plainclothes cops suddenly descended on her and found the two bags of marijuana on her.
"I am looking for a dismissal in the interest of justice," said Ron Kuby, one of two lawyers representing Jackson. "I would hope the Bronx district attorney's office has more important cases than prosecuting a great-granny for medicinal marijuana."
After her arrest, Jackson was handcuffed and brought to jail. She was taken to the 46th Precinct stationhouse, photographed, fingerprinted and issued a desk appearance ticket that she must answer today.
Her other lawyer, David Pressman, said it's heartbreaking to see a senior citizen who was "just trying to survive" handcuffed and held in police custody for five hours.
Steven Reed, a spokesman for the Bronx district attorney's office, said his office is not aware of the case because it hasn't come into the the DA's office.
Jackson hopes to get a chance to tell her story.
She weighed 99 pounds when she entered Lincoln Hospital in 1998. After surgery and treatments she lost even more weight. Jackson said her doctor prescribed an appetite enhancer, but it made her sick.
"The medicine gave me a terrible headache," said Jackson, who was raising three great-grandchildren at the time. "I was very weak and sick after treatments. I had diarrhea and was vomiting all the time.
"The smell of food made me sick and I was nauseous," she said. "The marijuana calmed me down and gave me back my appetite. My taste buds are gone, but the marijuana helps me get the food down."
Jackson said she puffed marijuana twice a day in the privacy of her home. Jackson, who now weighs 124 pounds, credits the marijuana with saving her life.
"The marijuana has kept me alive; I wouldn't be here if I didn't smoke," Jackson said. "I know it's illegal, but I did what I had to do to make myself comfortable and restore my quality of life."
And just how does it become your business what someone ingests in the privacy of their own home? As long as they stay at home and do not present a public danger? Who appointed YOU as arbiter of what anyone else may or may not put into their own bodies? Are you our owner? Is FedGov? If you cannot provide GOOD answers to these questions, then obviously you are WRONG and should be soundly derided for your authoritarian lunacy. It is NOT and never has been the business of government to outlaw any substance for any reason. That they did so, quite unconstitutionally, in the opinion of the founders who did NOT grant any such authority, only indicates their desire for total and complete control over the lives of the citizenry. And you, if you call yourself a conservative, should be LIVID about that affront to freedom and the Constitution. That you are not speaks volumes about you, and none of it any good.
Actually, that is NOT how our nation was EVER intended to work. What the Constitution (as in Constitutional Republic) does is grant government certain VERY LIMITED authority to act in our names and on our behalf. If you read carefully and with a modicum of comprehension, you will see that the government is not allowed to do much of anything that each individual may not morally or legitimately do... which specifically includes the INABILITY to criminalize the possession and use of things which may offend YOU. YOU cannot morally or legitimately ban ANYONE (outside yourself and/or your MINOR children) from doing ANY VOLUNTARY, NON-COERCIVE thing. Period. And since YOU cannot do it yourself, you may NOT, in our CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC, ask government to do it for you.
The MOST that State and Local governments can do is regulate PUBLIC BEHAVIORS. That is, they can say that if you appear in public when you are under the influence of ANYTHING, you may be stopped and cited and even arrested if your PUBLIC behavior endangers the lives and property of others. That's it and that's all.
you say that like it's a bad thing ...
OK
Tony would fall...No one can touch MC Rove.
Sounds like the loud voice of inexperience to me.
It's extremely effective as an anti-nausea drug, virtually instantaneous and has few undesirable side effects.
The only thing wrong with marijuana is it's illegal. There's no logic in that, only the brute force of the state focused by an ancient prohibitionist, Harry J. Anslinger.
Anslinger was desperate to keep his cadre of prohibition enforcers together, and so seized on marijuana as the "demon weed". He was as full of crap then as his successor prohibitionists are today.
There is no cogent medical reason for marijuana to be illegal. There is a huge (drug prohibitionist) industry interested in keeping it illegal, however.
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