Old pot conviction still carries stigma

Back in 2010 when law enforcement authorities were making big headlines busting marijuana grow houses in Southern Nevada neighborhoods, Lisa Folkestad’s arrest didn’t generate even a snippet of news.

Local TV news crews usually eager to chase the latest derring do from the SWAT team didn’t bother to tag along on the Folkestad takedown.

Then again, she wasn’t fronting for a Mexican drug cartel. Nor was her modest home bursting with illicit cannabis.

When the dust cleared and Folkestad and her son were taken into custody, authorities had managed to round up 11 pot plants, nine of which fit comfortably into a 6-foot-long grow box.

As victories in the never-ending war on drugs go, it was essentially a Cheech &Chong skit gone awry.

But the charges Folkestad and her son faced were anything but humorous: She was accused of possession with intent to sell and trafficking. Those are serious felonies that can bring withering prison sentences.

Did I mention Folkestad and her son both possessed medical marijuana cards?

That’s right. She had a prescription for the pot to treat a chronic back problem and anxiety — the latter of which increased substantially after the plants were plucked and she was hauled away in handcuffs.

She clearly recalls being told by the state that she could grow the marijuana. She just couldn’t buy it or sell it.

“They couldn’t even see the plants until they opened up the box that was back in one room,” Folkestad, 53, recalls. “We thought we were doing what the law said. …

“It was during the time when they were really cracking down on it. It seemed like every day and every night there were stories on television about grow houses being busted with hundreds of plants inside of them — whole houses filled with plants.”

She takes care to remind skeptics that until meeting the SWAT team she had no official experience with law enforcement. She had worked as a legal assistant at a local attorney’s office before her arrest and eventual plea bargain for conspiring to obstruct the state’s substance law. She received no jail time but caught two years of probation. (The probation was set aside by the judge after 10 months.) She wasn’t compelled to pay a fine or a cent of restitution.

“We had never been in trouble,” she says. “Neither one of us ever even had a traffic ticket.”

She realized things weren’t going well when she tried to explain to a prosecutor why she used medical marijuana for chronic pain. The powerful pills commonly prescribed for such maladies were addictive and had been the source of misery for friends and family.

“Couldn’t you just find yourself some Lortab?” came the reply.

Facing the threat of a prison sentence, she accepted a plea deal.

She doesn’t have any colorful penitentiary stories to tell, but Folkestad does have a felony criminal record. And she’s not alone. Across the country thousands of Americans carry felony status for relatively minor marijuana convictions. While pot smoking has become more acceptable than ever, the stigma of a felony conviction can have a substantial and even devastating impact on peoples’ lives. For her part, Folkestad says she’s had a difficult time finding work and believes her felon status is to blame.

While Nevada’s municipalities and counties jockey with state officials for medical marijuana license approval and a piece of the lucrative action, and states such as Colorado and Washington have legalized pot for recreational use, it’s only fair that our political leaders work to set aside the felony records in cases such as Folkestad’s.

“During the time when this was going on there was such a gray area,” she recalls. “None of us really knew what we could do or couldn’t do.”

Folkestad and her son learned the hard way.

Medical marijuana has lost its stigma in 2014, but felony status is harder to scrub off.

John L. Smith’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Email him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 702-383-0295. Follow him on Twitter @jlnevadasmith.