Parents Under Fire: Prop 215 doesn’t cover parents’ rights

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It’s a nightmare that could happen to any parent who is also a medical cannabis patient: A marriage squabble starts and a neighbor calls the police to report shouting. The responding officer sees or smells cannabis, and calls in a social worker who takes a look around and takes the kid. Depending on the judge and county, it could be months before Mom and Dad get their child back.

California activists are warning patients of this little-known reality in 2015—you can lawfully use medical cannabis and still lose your kid. “Proposition 215 protects a person from criminal prosecution only,” states Santa Rosa child law attorney Jennifer Ani. “It has nothing to do with the best interest of a child or protecting a child.”

Ani said she sees kids removed from good parents all the time. “Qualified patients can be parents, that’s the law. But a social worker who, say, doesn’t like ‘potheads’—and they are just about everywhere—they will pick apart your lives,” she said. “So much power is in the hands of child protective services—that’s number one. You can’t ever think you are going to win because the law is on your side,” Ani said.

Though California has had the Compassionate Use Act for 19 years, stigma against the healing botanical runs deep in the state’s courts and social workers, experts say. Social workers can remove kids for anything that they deem “endangers the health of the child” and that includes use of cannabis—a federally illegal drug treated as equal to heroin and PCP.

For example, the California Narcotics Officers Association—who states “marijuana is not medicine”—is in charge of training rural county Child Protective Services’ workers on how to handle “drug-endangered children.”  Just being on a property with cannabis plants can start a case.

“Those who choose to grow marijuana at the expense of the safety of their children can be considered for the charge of child endangerment,” states Drug-Endangered Children training center documents obtained by CULTURE.

Ani relates the story of a mom and her children who picked the wrong day to visit dad, who was living in Butte, CA. When code enforcement officers showed up, she was arrested, and she lost her infants for 90 days. Butte has the highest rate of child removal in the state, followed by San Francisco, Riverside, Sonoma and Kings County, according to a 2011 report from the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition Executive Board Member Diane Goldstein said, “we’re letting law enforcement teach social workers—who should be concerned about keeping families together—how to snatch kids.”

When cases end up in court, the ignorance is jaw-dropping, Ani said. “We had a drug-endangered child expert who testified that if a child were to eat raw bud they could die,” said Ani. The expert cited two articles from the internet and had a degree from Genesis Bible College. Cannabis has no overdose, the National Cancer Institute states, and eating raw plants has no psychological effects—you have to heat cannabinoids to activate them. Yet the court still ruled against the parents, and it took an appellate court to reverse it.

Moms are under fire, said Ani. “You have to hide,” she said. “I’m not an alarmist. This is scary stuff.” She holds little hope for change, either. “There needs to be a new generation [of social workers], I think.”

“[Child Protective Services] does not follow the law and every mother who thinks that they are safe from CPS because they have a medical marijuana ID card is dreaming. It has nothing to do with child safety. They’re going to look at how you use marijuana.”