Monroe Piland III, marijuana activist, charged with spiking his child’s milk with pot

Monroe Gordon Piland III, a former physician and longtime advocate of medical marijuana, was charged with nine drug-related offenses on Wednesday after authorities said he administered the plant’s active ingredient to his child over the course of several years.

Between 2011 and 2015, the Candler, North Carolina, resident routinely served goat’s milk mixed with marijuana leaves to a minor under the age of 13, investigators said. During roughly that same span, prosecutors say the 69-year-old pot proponent administered marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient “by repeatedly blowing tetrahydrocannabinol in the face of [the child],” Asheville’s Citizen-Times newspaper reported on Thursday.

The latest charges against Piland include multiple counts of delivering a controlled substance to a child aged 13 or younger, a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile, misdemeanor child abuse and two charges of possession with intent to sell and deliver drugs, the paper reported.

A raid last year on Piland’s Buncombe County home led authorities to filing several drug-related charges in January, with this week’s indictments bringing the grand total of counts against him to 15, the paper reported.

Piland was licensed to practice medicine in North Carolina starting in 1979, but he had his privileges revoked five years later after being convicted of felony manufacturing of a controlled substance and possession of marijuana. He has been an outspoken supporter of the plant’s medicinal qualities in the decades since.

“What I do know is that the law against a plant is blasphemous,” he told the Citizen-Times after a court hearing earlier this year. “Humans are confused at times, obviously, with trying to make a plant illegal.”

“Anybody that believes in God and believes a plant should be illegal is committing blasphemy,” the activist said.

Piland is scheduled to go before a judge on Thursday, the paper reported.