No Weed is Worth a Life
This morning my local newspaper, The Oregonian, reported the story of a 48-year-old man who stabbed a 16-year-old. The teenager had jumped his fence and was trying to steal some of the middle-aged man’s pot plants. Now the man is facing charges of attempted murder, assault, felon in possession of a firearm and unlawful manufacture of marijuana within 1,000 feet of a school.
According to the report, the man found the teenager in his back yard attempting to steal plants. They struggled and the man stabbed the teen multiple times in the chest and back. When neighbors saw the bloody teen stagger and collapse in the street, they called 911. When police arrive, the man barricades himself in his home for hours before surrendering. The teen is now recovering at the hospital.
What disturbs me about the story is the man, who is a registered medical marijuana patient, reportedly had “more than 320 mature marijuana plants and nearly 170 immature ones.” As a medical marijuana patient, he’s entitled legally to grow 6 mature plants and 18 immature ones. But it’s not the gross disregard for plant limits that is disturbing, it is the man’s apparent greed.
Over three hundred plants and the teen just had to be stabbed? What, was the man worried the kid would steal them all? Just how much can this kid carry, anyway?
No pot plant is ever worth another human’s life. This goes for the actions you’d take if you spot a ripper and it applies to protecting your garden from rippers. Shooting or stabbing a ripper or building a booby trap to hurt a ripper is only going to add serious charges to your trial if you’re ever caught. Or worse, your actions could hurt or kill you, like the New York man who decapitated himself earlier this month by driving his ATV through a piano wire booby trap he’d set for rippers.
Of course, the ultimate culprit here is marijuana prohibition. Under legalization this man’s pot growing business wouldn’t be hidden in a residential neighborhood defended by a greedy paranoid guy with guns and knives. The pot also wouldn’t be so potentially lucrative that it would invite thefts by teens. After all, I haven’t read any stories about a man stabbing a kid who was trying to steal his cases of home-brewed beer. And if anyone was sneaking in to raid the vast legal marijuana field, the farmer could just call the cops.
