"Carl's Cannabis Corner" with Carl Olsen

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About Carl

I was born in Wisconsin in 1951 and raised in Iowa by Danish Lutheran parents. I got arrested for smoking marijuana in 1970 and the experience left me feeling that my civil rights had been violated. That same year, 1970, I was introduced to a Rastafarian religion from Jamaica. A branch of that church was incorporated in Florida as the Zion Coptic Church in 1975. The parent church was incorporated in Jamaica as the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church in 1976. I incorporated a branch of that church as the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church here in Iowa in 1984. In 1980, several members of the church including myself got arrested for unloading a boat with 20 tons of marijuana.1 Our lead attorney was former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. The U.S. District Court would not allow us to present a religious defense. I went to prison in 1984 and was released on parole in 1986. From 1980 to 1984, I spent most of my spare time in the Dade County, Florida law library and the University of Miami law library reading about First Amendment case law. From 1984 to 1986, my job was running the prison law library. In 1991, I received a paralegal degree from the Des Moines Area Community College. Just prior to going to prison, in 1983 I filed a petition with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for the right to use marijuana as a religious sacrament based on the existing exemption for the sacramental use of peyote by Native Americans.2 My case was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1990, although it was reviewed in another landmark court decision, Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990). The ruling in Employment Division v. Smith was that there is no religious exemption for using drugs. Obviously, this country is familiar with religious drug use from Prohibition when the Catholic Church had an exemption for sacramental wine. In 1993, the U.S. Congress unanimously voted to overturn the ruling in Employment Division v. Smith by enacting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA). RFRA was found unconstitutional as applied to the states by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1997, and RFRA was amended in 2000 by the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA). RFRA remains valid as applied to federal laws. In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court applied RFRA to the drug laws and granted an exemption for the sacramental use of a hallucinogenic tea by a South American religion, Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal, 546 U.S. 418 (2006). In January of 2007, I filed a new case for my right to use marijuana as a religious sacrament based on equal protection. The courts denied my claim by saying it was barred because I had raised that same issue back in 1982 at my criminal trial for possession of 20 tons of marijuana (at that time I based my equal protection claim on the exemption for the sacramental use of peyote). At the same time the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that sacramental use of drugs in protected by RFRA, it also issued a landmark ruling on states’ rights to determine accepted medical practice, Gonzales v. Oregon, 546 U.S. 243 (2006). In that case, the court said it was the states, and not the federal government, that determine accepted medical practice. That decision woke me up to the fact that state medical marijuana laws are state determinations on accepted medical use of drugs. I talked with the ACLU of Iowa about it and they agreed. We are now engaged in a state case, McMahon v. Board of Pharmacy, dealing with that issue.

¹ United States v. Carl Olsen, 738 F.2d 497 (1st Cir. 1984)

² Carl Olsen v Drug Enforcement Administration, 878 F.2d 1458 (DC Cir. 1989)

Previous Show Archive

	Show Name	Show Date
	Carl’s Cannabis Corner – January 24, 2010	January 24, 2010
	Carl’s Cannabis Corner – January 17, 2010	January 17, 2010
	Carl’s Cannabis Corner – January 10, 2010	January 10, 2010
	Carl’s Cannabis Corner – January 2, 2010	January 2, 2010
	Carl’s Cannabis Corner – December 26, 2009	December 26, 2009
	Carl’s Cannabis Corner – December 19, 2009	December 19, 2009
	Carl’s Cannabis Corner – December 12, 2009	December 12, 2009
	Carl’s Cannabis Corner – December 5, 2009	December 5, 2009
	Carl’s Cannabis Corner – November 28, 2009	November 28, 2009
	Carl’s Cannabis Corner – November 21, 2009	November 21, 2009

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