This medical pot salesman could be jailed 35 years in Washington — where pot is legal
Medical and recreational marijuana is legal in Washington state — so why is Lance Gloor, who operated several medical pot dispensaries, facing 35 years in jail for his business?
Gloor's trial began on Friday and continues Monday in Tacoma, Washington. He's in court thanks to fuzzy legal language regulating medical sales in his state: At issue is the question of whether dispensaries like Gloor's broke the law when they sold the produce of multiple "collective gardens" of weed to qualified medical customers.
Also complicating matters is the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, which was renewed in the recent omnibus spending bill. That provision in theory would prohibit the federal government from prosecuting medical marijuana sellers in states where the product is legal, but in practice the Department of Justice has chosen to interpret the amendment in a way that does little to limit its raids on dispensaries like Gloor's.
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"The government is sort of picking and choosing who they want to prosecute without any sort of coordination," said Gloor's defense attorney, Michael Schwartz. "At the time that these allegations arose, the dispensaries were in fact legal under state law. Quite frankly, I think they just don't like the idea that these dispensaries were doing very, very well financially."
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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