Seattle University Cites School Policy in Suspending Student for Legally Selling Pot Brownies
ByDue to a policy at Seattle University (SU) that conflicts with state law, one student was suspended and can no longer afford to go to school when she had just one year left.
According to KOMO News, the student, who requested anonymity, started selling brownies laced with marijuana this year to pay tuition. Medical or recreational, marijuana is legal in the state of Washington, but the school prohibits the consumption, possession or distribution of the substance.
SU's policy is protected by Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act, meaning the student cannot fight to have her suspension reversed.
"Universities must have policies in line with the federal Drug Free Schools law or risk losing federal financial aid for its students," Dean Forbes, an SU spokesman, told the Huffington Post. "Universities are prohibited under federal law from discussing cases or actual facts regarding personal records of students."
The students said she wanted to sell pot brownies to sick people and first started doing so in Oct. when she got the help of a friend to bake a batch.
"I had no idea that working for a dispensary could get that kind of repercussion," she told KOMO News. "My roommates got ahold of some of them.
"They ended up selling them to a freshman girl."
After that person got sick, the school suspended the student for one academic year upon learning of how the freshman girl acquired marijuana. But Jiovani McKelvy, a dispensary operator who was helping the student, said the school is being unfair to the students by not punishing those who helped her.
"She's not trying to make money from just the general public. These are people who need them, to use them for medicinal purposes," McKelvy told KOMO News. "The other people who did take them and sell them, I think they should have been expelled or suspended.
"The fact that they are going unpunished is completely ludicrous."