Why is Washington's CPS Treating Marijuana Different Than Alcohol?

Thompson Family minus son in foster care
ABC 20/20 image

Why is the CPS treating marijuana differently than alcohol in Washington state? Child Protective Services have torn apart a young family over marijuana, a legal substance in the state.

ABC’s 20/20 is reporting that this family ran a legal marijuana dispensary from the old days when people needed permission from doctors to use the plant:

Jesse and his wife Vicca Thompson, are from Sedro-Wolley, Washington, where marijuana use, including recreational, is now legal. The Thompsons are both medical marijuana users with doctor’s prescriptions. Jesse Thompson, a cancer survivor, takes it for pain, while Vicca Thompson, 43, uses it for arthritis and a nervous condition. They run their business, a medical marijuana dispensary and garden store called the Grow Shop, where they sell home-grown strains of marijuana as well as marijuana edibles, and are strong advocates of medical marijuana.

The Thompsons were reported to CPS by a former employee after admitting giving cannabis to their children topically for rashes and in edible form as a mood stabilizer, much like some parents may use chemical pharmaceuticals or whiskey to soothe a teething baby. This, by itself, is not observable harm, especially considering that they’re all legal substances.

What’s more, multiple strains of medicinal marijuana are not even psychoactive. As ABC points out “But there is an apparent gap between the enforcement of child protection laws and marijuana statutes. In many cases, child protection services are taking children away from legal, legitimate users of medical marijuana. Not all types of medical marijuana gets you high, but a lot of it is psycho-active, which can get you high.”

Cannabis seeds of these strains are readily available for legal purchase almost everywhere. Further, applying lotions and eating raw cannabis juice also have no psychoactive effects even if the strain has high THC levels. And there are amazing clinically proven health benefits to eating cannabis with no few measurable side effects. Watch the brief video below if you want your mind blown.

None of this seemed to matter to the Washington CPS. They’d rather play the role of bureaucrat nanny, claiming that they don’t need actual evidence of serious harm because they wield a government study.

“We have irrefutable evidence that it’s damaging for kids,” Dr. Leslie Walker told 20/20.

They have irrefutable evidence that Ritalin, fast food, fluoride, aluminum, alcohol, and a host of other chemicals are “damaging” too. None of them constitute abuse worthy of breaking up families. Not by a long shot.

Hey CPS, yeah I’m talking to you now; you want to know what damage really looks like? It’s tearing down a quiet family business and taking a healthy child away from his loving parents, “It’s destroying me. I can’t not be with my son. He is all that matters,” Jesse said of having his son taken away.

That’s real damage, not your government studies that only serve to propagate a dying war on a helpful plant. But, alas, it appears that more than common sense is needed to rectify CPS’s lust for “doing good.” So I’ll provide it.

The CPS can’t target parents merely because they’re casual drinkers or even if they give their children alcohol. Parents are legally permitted this right under the federal “Parental Exemption” from the states’ legal age laws. Perhaps this wording needs to be added to the “Safer than Alcohol” state legislation in Washington to avoid any more damage to innocent families?

Why am I not surprised ABC couldn’t make this connection? However they did successfully get Mom Thompson to agree it’s bad to give children cannabis unless an authority figure says it’s okay.

“We’re going to hide the marijuana,” Vicca Thompson said after Jerry returned home. “I definitely feel like I shouldn’t give it to children.”

But Vicca Thompson said if it was legal to give marijuana to children, she would do so.

“If I lived somewhere else and a doctor was looking over me, telling me that it was okay, then I would think, ‘Yeah, it’s totally safe,’ especially to put salve on a cut or a rash,” said Vicca Thompson.

Hey marijuana moms: You own your body. You decide what’s best for your children’s health. You don’t need an authority figure to say it’s okay to experiment with a natural plant for it to be okay. Those days are over now even if the CPS is the last one to get the memo.

This story is almost as bizarre as limiting the possession amounts of a legal plant deemed safer than substances with no possession limits, which I recently wrote about here concluding “Either you own your body or not. And marijuana is either a legal substance with no possession limits or it’s not. Compromise on these issues is not logical or practically enforceable.”

Finally, ridiculous regulations in Washington have pitted medial marijuana versus recreational marijuana and you can bet many more wacky stories will be coming out of “legal” pot.

This episode of 20/20 aired last night – check ABC for the full show. Leave your thoughts in the comment section below.

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