It’s growing season in Doug’s state-approved and police-reviewed medical marijuana greenhouse. (Photo courtesy Doug Wright)
I have a few choice observations to make concerning marijuana. Since mankind discovered smoking, we have been using marijuana for various human ailments, including depression.
Somewhere along the line, someone decided that this needed to be monitored and regulated and this someone wanted to be paid for doing it. Then, wouldn’t you know, they decided that you could only get it from them and if you grew your own they would throw you in jail.
This sets up, for the last hundred years, a ridiculous, hypocritical situation in which nice folks are forced into secret gardening, risking their very property. But this slowed down only the timid; most folks, including me and many of my longtime friends and colleagues, have grown our own, because who can afford to buy it from the commercial growers?
Well, finally, enough intelligent folks succeeded in getting the law changed, making it possible for physicians to prescribe marijuana for patients for whom it worked. We should note that it doesn’t work for everybody.
I went and got my permit and planted my plants in the house, preparing for the outdoor garden. I put up a fence of sorts to satisfy the law and had a good garden. The next year the cops came and looked it over and weren’t all that happy with my security but let it go.
Then two other friends who had permits asked me to grow theirs in my garden. Well, Robin and I put in fence posts, 2 feet in the ground and 6 feet above it, and then covered the fence with barbed wire on insulators, ran an underground wire from our concealed electric fence charger, and hooked it up. The charger says it is good for 30 miles of fence! I bought a first-class greenhouse, which cost a fortune, and put in the plants.
I was very happy when two carloads of cops showed up one day and a state trooper shook my hand and told me what a wonderful improvement I had made in my security. He said this while standing by my little sign on the wire that says: caution – 100,000 volts! Haven’t seen a cop since. Many of you will recall the half-page column I wrote about it, including a large photo of my greenhouse. My pot-smoking friends were shocked, of course.
Now this brings me to my point of argument. My physician told me that I was certified and prescribed marijuana for the rest of my life. Now my question is this: why do I have to pay $219 in advance to a third party to get my card for the greenhouse every year?
I was told on the phone by this certain licensing organization that they had my paperwork and that their physician had already approved me and all I needed to do was send them $219 and I could get my card. I want to know why we need this entirely new system with tenured and benefited employees that is costing a lot of money.
I have decided to agitate this question until I get to lecture the Legislature again. I have done it twice before.
Now, you understand also that when we legalize marijuana this fall, they will set up another system to sell you a grow-your-own license! You just watch and see if they don’t. I understand that there is a plot afoot by His Excellency the Governor to drug-test food stamp recipients. There will be riots in Augusta, you watch and see.
A visit to my garden will show the fence and the sign, and we have a beagle dog that sleeps in the window nearest the garden – no visitors please, especially after dark. There are other surprises too.
(Doug Wright lives over Head Tide Hill in Whitefield. He welcomes feedback at douglas.wright22@yahoo.com.)
