A father who treated his severely disabled son with cannabis oil was acquitted by the courts on Friday in Papeete, French Polynesia, with the court finding an “irrepressible situation”.
” I am relieved. It was a stressful moment. I am ready to do anything for my son (…) Thanks to justice,” declared Ariimatatini Vairaaroa, a 47-year-old man, leaving the court. In May 2022, the gendarmes seized some 110 cannabis plants in his garden in Tahiti.
The forty-year-old used it to make oil which he administered to his 10-year-old son, who is autistic and suffers from epilepsy, disorders resulting from the adverse effects of a vaccine received when he was 9 months old. The boy, aged 10 today, had “20 seizures a day”, according to his relatives, who were helpless due to the lack of effective treatment.
“We are illegal”
“We looked on the Internet. I saw parents like me who were planting cannabis. That’s what I did. But there is the law. We are illegal. For a month, he had no more seizures. We were sleeping. He also made progress until the gendarmes came,” Mr. Vairaaroa testified before the court, which ruled by a single judge.
His lawyer, Me Thibaud Millet, denounced in his pleading “unworthy” and “inhumane” prosecutions which, according to him, led to a “breakdown in care” of the child. “The law absolutely needs to change. We have completely inadequate legislation. It is scandalous not to be able to treat patients for whom there are products on the world market which are prohibited in French Polynesia (…) We are forcing these parents to treat in hiding,” he added on the sidelines of the audience.
Rarely, the public prosecutor sitting at the hearing, Michel Masars, dissociated himself from his peers in the prosecution, declaring that if he “had had to know the situation” of the father of the family, he “would not have not initiated any prosecution.” The magistrate, who said he “bowed before” the “suffering” of this family, requested a “dispensation from sentence”, considering that the facts were nevertheless characterized due to the seizure of the 110 plants.
Upon the announcement of his client’s acquittal, motivated by the “irrepressible situation” he is facing, Me Millet hailed an “extremely rare decision”, a “great moment of justice”.
In French Polynesia, the debate on therapeutic cannabis has been underway for several years. The president of this French Pacific community, Moetai Brotherson, said he was in favor. The use of cannabis for recreational purposes is also common in the territory.
