Earlier this year, Kansas police seized an 11-year-old child from his mother’s custody, all because her son had referred to marijuana as “cannabis” and objected to the anti-pot narrative taught in his school. Now that mother might spend the next 30 years of her life in prison.
38-year-old massage therapist Shona Banda has Crohn’s disease and uses cannabis oil to deal with the symptoms, even though medical marijuana remains illegal in her state. She has spoken widely on the topic online and wrote a book in 2010, Live Free or Die, recounting her “salvation and resurrection thanks to medical cannabis.”
She has always been frank about her self-medication–according to her defense attorney, when she first moved to Garden City, Kansas, she “took a copy of her book to the sheriff’s department and said, ‘This is who I am.’”
In March, during a drug education class at his school, her young soon stood up to counselors and objected to their anti-marijuana talking points. The disgruntled school employees removed him from the class and called Child Protective Services. Soon police arrived at Banda’s house, without a warrant, and barred her from entering her home for three hours.
When they finally obtained a warrant, they found “approximately 1 1/4 pounds of suspected marijuana” and her lab for manufacturing cannabis oil.
In a recent interview with Forbes’ Jacob Sullum, Banda’s criminal defense attorney Sarah Swain argued that this “contraband” is much less nefarious than police made it sound.
“She was producing oil during the day, while her son was in school,” Swain said, contrary to law enforcement’s claims that she was endangering her child.
“The quantity of cannabis that Banda had may seem like a lot for a recreational user, but it isn’t for a daily medical user who consumes marijuana in the form of extracts,” wrote Sullum.
Banda remains separated from her child—he’s currently living with his father—and faces charges of two misdemeanors and three felonies, including endangering a child and distribution or possession with intent to distribute a controlled substance within 1,000 feet of school property (a particularly absurd “felony” accusation, since Banda lives within 1,000 feet of a school, and wasn’t hanging out at the playground hawking pot as the charge suggests.)
Kansas law also permits sentences for separate crimes to be stacked upon each other, as long as the total years served don’t work out to longer than twice the longest maximum sentence. In Banda’s case, according to Swain, that means she could be sentenced for up to 34 years in prison.
Sullum notes that Banda could fight the charges by challenging law enforcement’s potentially unconstitutional behavior at her house–when they “secured” the investigation by camping out on her property and refusing to allow her to enter her home. (Banda even recorded the whole episode on her phone.) She could also fight the distribution charges. But she’s all but certain to be charged for manufacturing the oil, which comes with an eight year sentence.
“Shona has always been open about her use of cannabis oil,” Swain said. “To me, this is just a glaring example of how ridiculous the war on drugs in this country has become.”
Read Sullum’s full story here. Watch an interview with Banda, where she discusses Crohn’s disease and medical marijuana, below:
