May 22, 2014 | Jacob Lavoro is a 19-year-old from Round Rock, Texas who allegedly made and sold brownies laced with hash. Hash is just the resin of regular old marijuana, but Lavoro was charged with a first-degree felony and faces five years to life in prison because he used that resin to make his brownies.
Lavoro has a spotless record, but Texas law makes a distinction between hash and marijuana, classifying hash possession as an automatic felony. To reiterate, hash is marijuana.
Hash is the gooey white crystals that naturally coat the buds of the cannabis plant. People usually just smoke those buds, but to “make” hash, all that’s necessary is to rub your fingers over the buds—off comes the hash.
Since Lavoro used hash to make the brownies, the state used the weight of the entire brownies—sugar, butter, flour and all—when calculating the total weight of the drug in possession, according to the Texas news station KEYE TV. It came out to about 1.5 pounds.
Lavoro’s lawyer, Jack Holmes, told KEYE TV following the first court date that the charge seemed totally unprecedented.
“I’ve been doing this 22 years as a lawyer and I’ve got 10 years as a police officer and I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said. “They’ve weighed baked goods in this case. … It ought to be a misdemeanor.”
By April M. Short
Source: alternet.org
