From Mother Jones:
In 2009, Iowa State Rep. Clel Baudler, a Republican from Greenfield, told me that he was thinking of fibbing his way into getting a medical marijuana card the next time he visited California. I laughed, but it turns out he wasn’t joking. In October, the 71-year-old former state trooper and ardent drug warrior sent a letter to his constituents detailing how he’d visited the notoriously pot-friendly Golden State, falsely told a doctor that he suffered from depression and hemorrhoids, and scored a license to inhale.
Photo by Governor Chet Culver/flickr
An excerpt from Baudler’s letter to his constituents:
The next day, Saturday, I asked my son to take me on Redondo Beach, leave me and I would give him a call when I was done. He refused to do it stating that I would probably get in trouble. He said, “I’ll take you to Venice Beach. It’s weirder,” and to put it bluntly, he was right.
Under California’s Compassionate Use Act of 1996, anyone who “fraudulently represents a medical condition or fraudulently provides any material misinformation to a physician” can be tossed in jail for up to six months and fined up to $1,000. Baudler’s defense: He’ll gladly appear in front of an ethics board because the “oriental ‘doctor'” who “only spoke broken English” probably isn’t a licensed physician.
To continue reading the rest of the article on Mother Jones, click here! Highly recommended!
