Man’s synthetic pot conviction upheld
WATERLOO, Iowa — The Iowa Court of Appeals has upheld the conviction of a man who was found guilty of possessing synthetic cannabis even though the specific substance he had wasn’t named on the state’s list of controlled substances.
Waterloo police arrested Cody James Darland Heinrichs in December 2011 after finding him with bag of 100 Percent Pure Evil during a traffic stop near the Fifth Street Bridge for expired license plates on his Kia. The substance inside was identified as AM-2201, which wasn’t listed by name as a controlled substance under Iowa Code until May 2012.
A district court judge found Heinrichs guilty after Heinrichs waived his right to a jury trial, and he was given probation.
On appeal, Heinrichs’s attorney argued the state law was vague and didn’t allow reasonable people to understand what substances are prohibited. He also argued that confusion over the law was compounded by the fact that Pure Evil was sold over the counter at New Star Liquor, court records state.
In a ruling issued Wednesday, the Iowa Court of Appeals upheld the conviction, nothing that the law covered tetrahydroannabinols as well as synthetic equivalents of the substances in cannabis and synthetic substances with a similar chemical structure. A criminalist with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation lab had been lined up to testify at Heinrichs’s trial that AM-2201 is designed to imitate the effects of marijuana on the brain.
The court further noted that he wasn’t simply caught with a substance he thought was incense because he was found with a pipe that he admitted was for smoking it.
"The Waterloo officers were sufficiently able to distinguish between persons who may have innocently possessed a ‘botanical potpourri’ and users who knew products sold as ‘incense’ offered hallucinogenic properties," the Court of Appeal wrote in its decision.
"Your as mighty as the flower that grows the stones away"