By Bryan Thompson
Heartland Health Monitor
GARDEN CITY — A Garden City mother whose home was raided March 24 after her son took issue with an anti-marijuana presentation at school turned herself in Monday at the Finney County Law Enforcement Center. Shona Banda, 38, was booked into jail and later released after posting $50,000 bond. She made her first court appearance on Tuesday and is scheduled to return to court in August.
Her attorney, Sarah Swain, of Lawrence, said Banda was charged with five counts — four of them marijuana-related — plus endangering a child. If convicted on all of them, she faces a maximum of 30 years in prison. “This is a woman who was using cannabis to treat a disease, Crohn’s disease, that was absolutely debilitating,” Swain said.
“So, not only is it that she’s facing life imprisonment just due to the years, but essentially it’s a death sentence.” Swain said cannabis oil cured Banda of her Crohn’s disease. “She was in and out of hospitals. She had multiple surgeries. It was absolutely debilitating, and all of that would be present in her medical records,” Swain said.
“The same records would show that once she started using cannabis oil, almost all of the conditions that she was suffering from — her inability to maintain weight, the chronic pain that she was in — all of those things essentially disappeared.” According to Swain, Banda has been without the oil since her home was raided.
“It is medicine, and she has already lost a dramatic amount of weight since she has not been using it,” Swain said. “She has had to have oral surgery due to some infections in her mouth that were kept at bay when she was using cannabis oil but have now come back. So her health is not good, and I think it will only continue to deteriorate as this case drags on.”
Swain said her ultimate goal is to stop marijuana from being classified as a Schedule I drug.
“It’s our goal with this case to not just change the way that Shona Banda is treated here in Garden City, Kansas, but to take this case every step of the way to litigate it all the way up to the United States Supreme Court, if we need to, to make sure that this drug is no longer classified as a Schedule I drug,” Swain said.
“And as soon as it’s classified as something less than that, millions of people’s lives will be positively affected by that change.”
Schedule I drugs, by definition, have no medicinal value and a high potential for abuse. Swain said there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of studies that show that cannabis does have value as a medicine. She said there has never been a confirmed death attributed to marijuana toxicity, which is not the case for many legal drugs — even aspirin.
Banda previously lived in Colorado, where marijuana is legal not only for medical use but for recreational use as well.
Garden City is only about an hour’s drive from the Colorado border, but possession of any amount of marijuana in Kansas is a felony on the second offense.
An April news release from the Garden City Police Department said officers found more than a pound of “suspected marijuana” in the search of Banda’s home. According to the police, Banda’s 11-year-old son told school officials that his mother and other adults in his residence were avid drug users.
School officials relayed the concern to the Kansas Department for Children and Families. The department reported it to the police, who then secured a search warrant. Swain said Banda had openly told her children that she believed her cannabis oil was more effective and safer than most of the prescriptions she had been given for Crohn’s disease.
“My understanding is that, in this discussion of the evils of marijuana that was taking place at school, her son simply said, ‘No, I disagree with what you’re saying about that plant,’ and things snowballed from there,” Swain said. Swain questions the constitutionality of the way the information was gathered, how the search warrant was prepared and the eventual search of the house. She vowed to “litigate all of those issues fully.”
Finney County Attorney Susan Richmeier did not respond to a message seeking comment about the case. The police department referred all inquiries to the county attorney. Meanwhile, an online petition started by two friends of Banda has picked up more than 140,000 signatures asking that she be shown mercy.
Chris Burley, senior campaigns manager for the petition site, Care2, drove from Denver with copies of the petition. “These messages have been sent electronically already to no response from the Finney County prosecutor,” Burley said. DCF did not respond to the public comments, he said, “and when we elevated the issue to Governor (Sam) Brownback’s office, that was also met with sort of tired and deafening silence.”
Burley, who grew up in Winfield, said his mother relied upon medical marijuana for relief as she was dying of colon cancer. “The only way that she was able to maintain an appetite through the final months of her life was through marijuana,” he said.
“And the fact that we have laws on the books now that would say that my dying mother, who was a school teacher who helped so many young lives, would go to prison simply because she was trying to ease her suffering, and trying to stay alive for her family and for those children, is unconscionable.”
Burley said the latest Pew Research poll on the issue reported that 53 percent of Americans favor unconditional legalization of marijuana — not just medicinal marijuana.
Bryan Thompson is a reporter for Heartland Health Monitor, a news collaboration focusing on health issues and their impact in Missouri and Kansas.
