Tonya Maxwell

tmaxwell@citizen-times.com

A gift of aphrodisiac chocolate balls to teachers has resulted in a new grand jury indictment against a marijuana activist, already jailed on charges that he gave marijuana to his minor-aged son.

Monroe Gordon Piland III, 69, was served Wednesday with an unusual charge: "distribute certain food at Halloween and all other times prohibited." The felony, which alleges he gave away food containing marijuana, stems from an incident on Valentine’s Day in 2013, detailed in a child custody case filed by Piland against the boy’s mother that same year.

Several emails from Piland were presented as evidence in that civil filing, one of them with the subject line “Valentine chocolate herb caper.” In it, Piland wrote that he made the chocolate balls mixed with herbs at a workshop and gave them to teachers, one of whom fell ill. The school’s director told Piland he was banned from campus until the contents of the sweets were determined.

“She [the director] said one of the teachers had a ‘strange reaction’ to the chocolates and asked if there were marijuana in them. I said no,” Piland wrote in an email, though he went on to detail that some of the sweets might have dropped into a pouch of sacred smoking herbs.

“…some cannabis flakes might have stuck to them,” he continued. “The amount would have been extremely small and in reality would have been less disruptive to normal physiology than the sodas that the school sells in the machines.”

In other emails, the director told Piland he was spending too much time at the school, bringing the stress of parental friction amid a court case to the campus as he sought long conversations with his son.

Piland explained to the judge in a March 2014 hearing that he had given his child marijuana “maybe five times” in an effort relieve the child’s stress and hyperactivity, which he attributed to violent video games.

He described giving the boy marijuana as raw leaf juice and in goat’s milk, and testified that he smoked around his son. The boy had also asked his father to blow marijuana smoke in his face, according to Piland’s testimony.

Those statements resulted in nine grand jury indictments against Piland in March, many of them related to consumption of marijuana by the minor.

As part of the custody case, the child was evaluated by a therapist, which led to a report to social workers regarding marijuana use.

Should the criminal case against Piland move to trial, his emails and statements from the civil court case would likely be entered into evidence against him, allowing prosecutors to avoid an uncomfortable situation wherein a son, now 13 years old, would be called upon to testify against his father.

A former physician and longtime cannabis advocate, Piland told the civil court judge that he has spent 30 years researching marijuana.

His North Carolina medical license was revoked in 1984 after he was convicted of felony manufacturing a controlled substance and possession of marijuana.

In December, the North Carolina Department of Revenue entered a tax debt against Piland for $16,612.

He is being held in the Buncombe County jail in lieu of $100,000 bond.

Updated: Marijuana activist charged with giving drug to child

Former physician defends Buncombe marijuana charges