« Late, Hopeful News on Cooley vs Harris | Main | California Election Aftermath »

November 11, 2010

Trial Update

A while back, I reported on a trial in which I’d volunteered to become an expert witness on behalf of a patient I’d first seen in April, 2002 when I was still a novice “pot doc” struggling to understand the new specialty I’d become involved in. My rationale was that over eight years of studying pot use as a behavior and publication of the only medical profile of Proposition 215 applicants should give me some standing to refute what I now regard as the mistaken assumptions still dominating popular discussions of cannabis use.

Yesterday the trial, which began in December, 2009 and stalled almost immediately over the prosecutor's demand for the raw data from an ongoing study (the names, addresses, and personal details of thousands of people seeking to comply with California law).

What it had finally taken for the trial to resume was for me to be represented by my own attorney who could then explain why honoring the prosecutor’s demand would violate the most basic canons of patient confidentiality. Yesterday, the long awaited resumption took place. As expected, there was no hint that the prosecutor had learned a thing about medical marijuana in the past eleven months; he was still intent on sending my patient to prison if at all possible. I could not even tell if he’d ever read the paper based on the data he had demanded, but my best guess is that he hadn’t.

The trial will resume sometime in January (marking the fourth calendar year since the patient's arrest). All indications are that my patient will be found not guilty by the judge, but that’s still not certain. What was confirmed for me is that our modern age is woefully in need of an overhaul; we humans are trapped within a system that's out of control because the most basic beliefs underpinning our behavior are still in dispute: was the universe created by a humanoid intelligence or did it simply evolve by complex mechanisms we are just beginning to understand?

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at November 11, 2010 05:18 PM

Comments