Sheila Polk, a prosecutor serving her fifth term of office as Yavapai County Attorney in Arizona, is so against marijuana that she went as far as to compare it to explosives.
According to Polk, products that contain cannabis extracts are like “explosives.”
In her February 1 filing in the Rodney Jones v. State of Arizona, claims that “chemicals” in plants aren’t really part of plants, they’re “entirely different substances.”
“The AMMA defines ‘marijuana’ as ‘all parts of any plant of the genus cannabis whether growing or not, and the seeds of such plant.’ … That non-specific definition does not mean that every conceivable chemical compound extracted from the plant is protected by the AMMA. Such chemicals are not ‘parts’ of the plant, but entirely different substances. A finding that the AMMA protects the narcotic drug cannabis would be akin to a finding that explosives produced from fertilizer are protected by laws allowing the sale of farm products,” she wrote.
Robert Mandel, Jones’ lawyer, has argued in his own brief to the Supreme Court: “The extracted resin … is no less ‘part’ of the cannabis plant than the juice of an orange is part of the tree.”
Mandel spoke to the Phoenix New Times and said, “By resorting to hyperbole like that, Yavapai [County] reveals that it has little faith in its legal arguments or in Arizona’s voters, who declared that patients may use any part of the cannabis plant as well as mixtures or preparations of marijuana to benefit from its medicinal resin.”