New reports coming out of Double Springs, Alabama have revealed that Winston County Sheriff Hobby Walker has been trying to get his hands on confiscated marijuana so he could give it to his aunt who was dying from cancer.
According to official reports filed in the county earlier this month, Walker began asking former deputies Zak Green and Steven Moody to steal marijuana that’d been confiscated at drug busts and give it to him.
The deputies claim that when they pushed back against the Sheriff’s requests, he fired them.
The whole thing began last May when Walker first started pressing the deputies to give him confiscated marijuana. Apparently bothered by what was going on, Green and Moody made an audio recording of Walker a few months later, when he asked them again for marijuana in August.
Then, in September, they went one step further, this time making a video recording of themselves giving confiscated marijuana to Walker.
Green and Moody were fired a short time later, in November.
As of now, there have been no charges brought against Walker, although the two deputies filed wrongful termination lawsuits earlier this month.
Anti-marijuana laws have long been criticized by the cannabis community as making it prohibitively dangerous for people to access the herb for medicinal uses.
These critiques have been bolstered in recent years as the scientific world begins to better understand the medicinal potential of cannabis, especially as a treatment for cancer.
For example, in response to “recent animal studies have shown that marijuana can kill certain cancer cells and reduce the size of others,” the National Institute on Drug Abuse updated its fact sheet last year, admitting that cannabis may in fact have cancer-treating properties.
Similarly, a growing body of studies indicates that cannabis may be an effective and safe way to manage pain, especially when compared to opioids, which are both heavily prescribed and dangerously addictive.
