Steven Fairlie was a guest on this morning’s nationally syndicated Price of Business Show. He and host Kevin Price spoke about the hidden pitfall of using medical marijuana in Pennsylvania. The “dirty little secret” is that if you drive with any amount of marijuana or metabolite in your system, Pennsylvania considers that a Marijuana DUI. As a result, you can go to jail, lose your driver’s license for a year or more, and have to install an ignition interlock device on your car that requires you to blow into it in order to be able to drive. It does not matter if you ingested the marijuana 3 days ago, 10 days ago, 15 days ago, or perhaps even 30 days ago. The metabolites can remain in your system for up to 30 days, and having any level of them in your blood within 2 hours of driving constitutes Marijuana DUI.
Legislators have been trying to fix this injustice for more than 8 years – unsuccessfully. Most people would agree that someone who is driving high is committing a Marijuana DUI, but someone who smoked marijuana 10 days ago, and is in no way under the influence? Not so much. So why can’t our government fix this? Click here to learn more about Pennsylvania DUI laws.
Price and Fairlie also discussed Pennsylvania’s laws regulating the purchase or possession of firearms. Anyone who buys a pistol, or a rifle from a dealer, must first complete a background check. This requires that you answer a 3 page typed questionaire accompanied by 3 pages of fine print instructions. To say that the questions and guidance are confusing is an understatement. For instance, it asks if you have even been convicted of a crime punishable by more than one year in jail. But under federal law, a crime punishable by more than one year is defined as a crime punishable by more than two years. Say what? Yes, a crime punishable by more than one year is defined as a crime punishable by more than two years in jail. You can’t make this stuff up!
The scary part is that anyone who makes a mistake on the form will be prosecuted, often for a felony. Take the client with an IQ of 70 who tried to buy a .22 rifle to shoot squirrels with. He had been convicted of a crime 30 years earlier that was punishable by 3 years. But he got a sentence of one year probation. Not being an expert in the law, that’s the part he remembered thirty years later. When Steve explained that his crime was punishable by up to 3 years in jail he kept stammering – but I got one year probation! Is this situation worthy of paying for multiple hearings before a full Court staff, conviction, and possibly jail time? Worth ruining the man’s life over by putting a recent conviction on his record? Click here to learn more about Pennsylvania Gun Charges.
Listen to the full show audio here.
Or contact me privately:
steve@fairlielaw.com
(215) 997–1000