In February, according to her own telling, WNBA star and Olympic gold medalist Brittney Griner did exactly what many of us have done at some point in our lives: realized she had an impending trip for which she hadn’t packed and threw together a bag, forgetting everything that was in there.
Thousands of Americans can relate to the frustrating experience of TSA pulling them aside to carefully extricate a pocket knife or small tube of lotion or something equally harmless as if it were a nuclear warhead.
The difference for Griner was that it was less than a gram of cannabis oil in some overlooked vape cartridges, and, to her misfortune, the finders weren’t TSA but Russian customs officers, who promptly took her into custody for illegal drug possession and smuggling.
The U.S. State Department has deemed Griner “wrongfully detained,” an official designation used when the government has information indicating that an American’s arrest overseas was invalid or that they will be treated unfairly in a foreign justice system.
And there is plenty of reason to fear that Griner will not be treated fairly. She is a lesbian in a country with an anti-LGBT government. She is an American in a country the United States is punishing with economic sanctions for its brutal and unprovoked war on Ukraine.
On Thursday, she pled guilty, an effectively forced plea in a country with a less than 1% acquittal rate in criminal courts. The sordid affair now moves into the diplomatic arena, where the Biden administration must use whatever leverage it has to bring Griner home. The straining of relations owing to madman Vladimir Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine surely makes this tougher, though Putin’s own weakening economic position could prove a useful pressure point.
It’s worth noting that, had it been the TSA that had found the cannabis, things would have turned out better but not totally OK. While recreational marijuana is legal in New York, where Griner took off from, it remains a Schedule I controlled substance for federal purposes, and while TSA doesn’t actively search for cannabis, if found it will refer it to law enforcement. This is an anachronistic stance made all the more puzzling by the fact that President Joe Biden could unilaterally deschedule marijuana, as a group of Democratic senators smartly implored him to do in a recent letter.
States across the nation have come to understand that marijuana regularization is overwhelmingly popular and morally right, a boon for public safety and racial justice. The Biden administration should take it as an opportunity for a joint message.
