Arizona AG Wants Court to Reinstate Ban on Medical Marijuana on College Campuses

In a twist and turn of events, Arizona's medical marijuana law has incidentally incriminated one of it's young patients due to a federal marijuana ban on college campuses. One student faced felony charges simply for possessing .3 grams of cannabis on university property. While the state Court of Appeals eventually tossed his marijuana conviction, legislators are still pushing for heavy bans on the medically legal drug on university campuses or threatening to terminate the school's federal funding. The ban of marijuana on college campuses may be necessary strictly for the purpose of keeping federal funding, however a college ban should be handled by the college rather than bypass state law which allows for patients to possess their medicine.

The state's new petition argues that by failing to ban marijuana from universities and college campuses, the schools risk the elimination of their federal funding. Federal law stipulates that in order to receives federal funding, colleges and universities must ban illegal drugs from their campuses.

Dean said the state's new argument is no better than the old one thrown out by the Court of Appeals in April. As the court ruled then, Dean pointed out, a ban is fine as long as it's not a criminal ban. Criminalizing possession for patients on university campuses, when the AMMA called for no such thing, doesn't further one of the AMMA's main purposes, which is to prevent the prosecution of state-authorized patients.

Not a single U.S. university has ever had its federal funding pulled because its state decriminalized marijuana, Dean said.