Health of sick Michigan MMJ patient jailed by feds for cultivation declining in custody

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Jerry Duval’s siezed grow operation.

Michigan marijuana patient and caregiver Jerry Duval was sentenced to 10 years in prison back in April of 2010 for “maintaining a drug premises” according to federal agents who raided his farm. A decade in jail will cost taxpayers more than $1.2 million.
But it could cost Duval, a cancer survivor several times over now suffering from coronary artery disease, glaucoma and neurpathy, his vision and possibly his life.


Duval’s wife, Tracey Duval, tells the Huffington Post that her husband has been given inadequate healthcare so far during his incarceration. Tracey says her husband has had two hemorrhages in his eyes that have left him blind in his right eye.
“It’s actually the worst one that he’s ever had,” Tracey told HuffPo earlier this week. “If this situation doesn’t get taken care of, he could lose his eye.”
Tracey has been pressing the Federal Bureau of Prisons to let her husband see an actual outside doctor for his ongoing eye issues – the same issues he was using state-legal cannabis for in the first place, mind you.
It’s probably not likely they’ll see any compassion. After all, this is the agency that denied him a compassionate release at the start of his stay in prison when his family pretty much predicted this exact scenario would happen.
His family at the time argued that his kidney treatments alone cost them more than $100,000 annually and the roughly $51,000 per-year spent on prisoners in federal medical center prisons just wouldn’t cut it.
“I humbly ask you whether locking up a disabled medical marijuana patient for ten years — a sentence longer than some child rapists and murderers receive — achieves the statutory mandate,” Jerry Duval wrote.
For their part, the prison isn’t saying anything. They say it is their policy to not comment on the medical condition of prisoners. It would be hard to have to admit the truth, we imagine: that letting a man die a slow death in jail over some medical cannabis plants is a foolish and cruel thing to do.

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