CU student caught in medical-marijuana debate

DENVER — A University of Colorado at Boulder student who is a medical-marijuana cardholder expects campus police on Monday to return marijuana that they had confiscated from him.

CU officials said student privacy laws kept them from discussing the case.

Edward Nicholson had threatened a lawsuit after he said campus police confiscated less than 2 ounces of pot from his dorm room.

Nicholson, 20, said he was holding the drug for his 23-year-old brother, a chronic-pain sufferer. State law allows marijuana to be used if recommended by a doctor for sufferers of debilitating medical conditions.

Patients’ caregivers must carry state-issued medical-marijuana cards. Nicholson is a cardholder, he said, because he says pot is easier to buy in Boulder than in Aurora, where his family lives.

Nicholson said that after campus officers smelled pot coming from his dorm room last winter, campus authorities threatened to suspend him for a semester, to commit him to community service and drug and alcohol testing, and have him write a paper about the harmful effects of the drug on his schooling.

After Nicholson’s lawyer Robert Corry threatened a lawsuit, CU officials abandoned the case.

Nicholson now lives off campus.

CU officials revised their policies this fall to ban students from storing marijuana in their dorms, even if they are medical marijuana cardholders. However, first-year students can be released from the on-campus residency requirement if they are cardholders, said CU lawyer Jeremy Hueth.

There are 1,955 cardholders in Colorado, according to last year’s statistics from the state health department.

Colorado Attorney General John Suthers said in response to the CU case that the medical-marijuana law has become a “front for widespread marijuana distribution.”

“The proponents of these laws make them intentionally ambiguous, causing significant problems for law enforcement in Colorado and elsewhere,” he said Friday.