Police raid on Gilbert home sparks medical marijuana outcry

Police raid on Gilbert home sparks medical marijuana outcry

By Mike Sakal, Tribune
A couple hours after a DirecTV worker saw marijuana and hashish inside a bedroom closet of Ross Taylor’s Gilbert home during the installation process of a satellite dish, 12 Gilbert police officers wearing masks and toting guns busted into his house and took his pot.

Taylor, 35, is a card-carrying medical marijuana patient under Arizona’s new voter-approved law, who said he uses it for a severe loss of appetite and sleep due to post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety.

But police said Taylor was not in legal possession of about 2 ounces of pot and a small amount of hashish that officers confiscated with some paraphernalia from his Gilbert home in the 7100 block of South Fawn Avenue on June 9.

Whether legitimate medical marijuana patients will become targets of prosecution involving how they obtained marijuana remains to be seen, as no such cases have reached the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, but Taylor said he believes the satellite worker overstepped his bounds by calling police after he showed him his medical marijuana card.

“The worker saw the marijuana in my closet and I told him, ‘Don’t get weird on me, I’m a medical marijuana patient,’ ” Taylor said. “He proceeded to tell me he was OK with it, and that he voted for it. I feel the police overreacted.”
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Police raid on Gilbert home sparks medical marijuana outcry