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SACRAMENTO, CA -- Closing arguments are expected today for People v. Matthew Zugsberger, in which a medical marijuana patient faces charges for carrying approximately three pounds of pot into Sacramento International Airport in December 2008. Although the possession itself is not contested, the jury will be left to decide whether Zugsberger transported marijuana illegally and whether he planned to sell it once he reached his intended destination in Louisiana. The jury’s deliberations, however, may have to be delayed if the 33 year-old defendant ends up being hospitalized while the trial is still in progress.
Zugsberger uses marijuana to treat conditions stemming from an injury he sustained while working as a deep-sea diver for an oil company, and the stress of the courtroom proceedings appears to exacerbate his symptoms. Yesterday, following testimony from the defense’s expert witness, Zugberger informed the judge that he was seriously ill and intended to go directly from the courtroom to a hospital. He then shocked onlookers by vomiting conspicuously into a courtroom trash receptacle. Jurors shot alarmed glances his way before they were dismissed for the day and told to return the following afternoon.
Thus far, Zugsberger’s trial has turned almost entirely on the issue of quantity. California’s medical marijuana laws protect the defendant when it comes to the possession and transport of marijuana for personal use, and Zugsberger says he intended the three pounds to be for his own ingestion only. The prosecutor, on the other hand, points to the sheer quantity as the main indicator that Zugsberger planned to sell the marijuana.
The marijuana in evidence, which was seized from Zugsberger’s luggage and his pants during the airport search, is indeed an amount that exceeds what most patients would require for a two-week journey. Still, Deputy District Attorney Satnam Rattu has little evidence beyond what can be implied. Absent pay-owe records and any other evidence of suspected purchasers, Rattu’s argument is essentially, ‘Come on -- he’s not going to use three pounds in two weeks. It must have been for sale. And if so, it was illegal for Zugsberger to transport or attempt to transport it.’
Of course, that is just a paraphrase of the argument; Rattu’s own speech is more eloquent. What he actually told the jurors was, “There is no reason to be traveling with three pounds of marijuana to Louisiana.” He made this and other similar appeals to the jury’s common sense, but his statements also left the matter open for the defendant to provide the reasons for his actions.
Zugsberger has long maintained that his marijuana was not for sale, and he testified on the stand to that effect yesterday. He disclosed that he was taking the marijuana to Louisiana so that a master chef there could infuse it into medicinal food products for his consumption. The quantity was justified, according to Zugsberger, primarily because so much plant material is required for the production of marijuana edibles.
Expert witness Chris Conrad followed Zugsberger to the stand yesterday, bolstering his testimony about quantities and the intended purpose of the marijuana. Conrad said that a patient typically requires four times as much marijuana if medicating by eating it as opposed to inhaling it, as the process of digestion requires the substance to pass through an array of digestive organs. The expert witness also told the jury that, depending upon the quality of the marijuana, up to 10% of its weight can be from unusable stems.
In addition, Conrad testified that it’s common for medical users to have more marijuana than necessary for their immediate consumption. Since there’s only one growing cycle per year, he explained, outdoor cultivators have to grow an entire year’s supply at once. For those who don’t grow their own, it’s cheaper to obtain it in bulk. Furthermore, Conrad pointed out that marijuana is subject to various kinds of loss, such as through theft or by going moldy, and these possibilities often prompt medical users to keep reserves on hand.
Rattu’s main strategy against the expert testimony was to suggest that Conrad was so biased towards the defendant that he would say anything to help him avoid a conviction. To this effect, the prosecutor listed a partial résumé of honors the witness had received from various drug reform organizations. He also presented a few quotes from Conrad’s writings and speeches, including a passage that compared marijuana prosecutions to slavery. Conrad was unshaken, vaguely acknowledging his political beliefs while calmly defending his ethics in the evaluation of the case. He did not believe in pure legalization, he clarified, but the regulation of marijuana in a manner similar to that of alcohol.
Finally, Rattu needled Conrad about Cantheism, a term he had created years ago in a paper that outlined a “universal set of practices and principles” amongst religions and cultures that use marijuana (cannabis) in worship. In particular, the prosecutor focused on a rite of passage in Cantheism in which a user may opt to initiate marijuana use at the age of sixteen, with parental consent. It appeared that Rattu’s goal was to paint Conrad as a crackpot and to scare the jurors with the notion that he might be promoting marijuana use by children. The affable Conrad countered by insisting that the principles of Cantheism were an amalgam of different religious practices involving marijuana, ranging from Sufi Moslems to Egyptians. These did not reflect his own personal beliefs, he maintained, since he advocated the responsible use of marijuana by adults only.
Very few of the questions put to Conrad during cross-examination touched on the case at hand. The ones that did, however, reflected the difficulty of the determinations being made. Conrad had testified that one indication that marijuana was intended for sale was when it was pre-packaged into many small gram-sized baggies. (Zugsberger’s marijuana had not been packaged in such a fashion.) However, Rattu got Conrad to acknowledge that marijuana might be kept in one large package if it was being transported for the purposes of being sold in another location. In the end, it seemed that there were no solid conclusions to be drawn from how Zugsberger’s marijuana was packaged, thus making the jury’s determination all the more tricky. If Zugsberger’s health is good enough to proceed, those determinations may be made today.
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