Texas Teenager Faces Life Sentence for Selling Pot Brownies

This headline, fresh out of Texas, recently graced news magazines: “Texas man faces possible life sentence for making and selling pot brownies.”

I, probably like many of you, thought for a moment I was reading The Onion or perhaps Wonkette. There is no way that in today’s culture of an ever-loosening attitude toward cannabis that this headline is real, right?

I shed a few tears for all of humanity when I found out that, not only is the headline real, it’s just as horribly ludicrous as it sounds.

Jacob Lovaro, a 19 year old from Round Rock, TX, was arrested for making and selling brownies infused with hash oil. He now faces life in prison due to an obscure facet of Texas law that allows for the entire weight of the finished product to be factored into the punitive weight of the drug itself. That means that the flour, eggs, milk, butter, etc. all get weighed as, and treated like, cannabis. What should have been a misdemeanor amount of cannabis possession under Texas law, ballooned into a felony charge carrying the minimum sentence of 10 years to life. It takes 400 grams of an illicit substance to warrant such a penalty.

Considering that one egg weighs about 55 grams, almost the same weight of 2 ounces of weed, it’s easy to see how a few grams of cannabis oil can jump into the hyperbolic range of 400+ grams when combined with the much heavier baking materials. This is well past insane, even for Texas. Yes, Lovaro probably should not have been trying to sell weed brownies in Texas. I’m not trying to say this kid made a wise choice, but this is like using a bazooka to kill a mosquito.

Worse still, when pressed to explain this horrifically unjust possibility, the local DA hid behind protocol saying that their job is to deal with the law as it’s written, not with what should or could be.

Lovaro’s father had this to say, ““Five years to life? I’m sorry. I’m a law-abiding citizen. I’m a conservative. I love my country. I’m a Vietnam veteran, but I’ll be damned. This is wrong. This is damn wrong! If he did something wrong, he should be punished — but to the extent that makes sense. This is illogical. I’m really upset, and I’m frightened, I’m frightened for my son.”

I can only hope that common sense prevails for this young man and that he gets a chance to make a better choice (or move to Colorado/Washington).

Tick tock, Mr. President. How many lives need to get demolished for something you used to do, before you flex the right muscles to end this nonsense and reschedule cannabis?