Thomas Grossi is 64 years old, a decorated Viet Nam veteran. Last October, two weeks away from an early release on a thirty month incarceration, he was pulled out of a halfway house and sent back to prison to serve the remaining year on his original sentence.

In 2006, Grossi was convicted by a federal jury of making his west Oakland warehouse available for growing marijuana, assertively for medicinal purposes. He was sent to prison in July of 2007, a thirty-month sentence, and was eligible for early release after he enrolled in a program of counseling and substance abuse treatment.

In the spring of 2008, he was transferred to a halfway house. In October, 2008, a bare two weeks away from custodial release, he was ordered back to prison to serve the remaining one year on the original sentence. Why? Because he ate two slices of poppy seed cake.

I am not making this up.

As a condition of his halfway house deal, and of his pending early release, Grossi had signed a lot of forms, agreeing, among other things, to stay off drugs. He was periodically tested, and he was always tested following return from a weekend pass.

Last October, Grossi tested positive for morphine, a substance he has never used. The reason for this false positive? He’d ingested poppy seeds in a cake. Really.

Seems that this effect is known to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, in the fine print among the documents Grossi signed was a warning about poppy seeds. The Bureau believes one warning, no matter how buried, is sufficient. No retesting is permitted.

Director Robert McFadden denied Grossi’s appeal –– which was supported by sworn affidavit by a local realtor, the person who had offered him the offending dessert –– saying “You were provided due process.” McFadden did not mention that “due process” in the case of Bureau of Prisons hearings and appeals includes a prohibition against legal counsel in the proceedings.

Since Grossi is not known to have ever used morphine, since he knew that he would be tested upon returning from his weekend visit home, and since he was two weeks away from freedom, ordinary common sense would suggest that McFadden is too stupid for the job and ought to seek work as a commentator for F*X News.

The person who shared a little cake with her friend, one Mary Smartt [and you can keep your comments to yourself, okay?], said, “Here’s somebody who’s doing all the right things... and he inadvertently takes something, not a drug, and they throw him back in prison...”

There have been court cases on the issue. Twelve years ago, a Florida woman was awarded almost a million smackers when an insurance company withdrew its job offer when she failed a drug test after muching on a poppy seed bagel. In 1990, a St Louis cop got his job back, with pay, after the department drug-tested a fellow officer who ate some poppy seed bagels and discovered the cop might’ve been telling the truth.

The Bureau of Prisons, denying his appeal, reminded him that he could always seek court intervention. But by then it’s a little late. “You’re not able to intervene until the harm’s been done,” said Grossi’s attorney, David Michael. “By the time you get a court to consider it, you’re already six to eight months into a sentence that may have been wrong to begin with.”

Of course, underlying this twisted situation is the legal prohibition against marijuana. We’ve got this weed which affords users a nice buzz, if not a spiritual door-opener, without any significant harmful effects.

So why is this stuff illegal? The prisons are already overcrowded and we incarcerate more people per capita than virtually any other nation on earth. A large percentage of these criminals are potheads. Why? Your friendly neighbor, your orthodontist, your golf partner, your accountant’s mother, and the judge who presided over your child’s hearing on curfew violation, they all smoke it.

Is it a matter of moral stricture? In America? Land of the twelve-pack, botox, ‘American Idol’, and designer jeans? Land of George Bush?

It can’t be revenue, at least not to the government or to the people. Legalizing and taxing it would reduce the load on the courts and jails, lower the cost of criminal justice, and bring a flood of cash into federal coffers. Probably, you could fund an entire health care system with it.

There’s a nasty edge right below the surface. Pot isn’t legal because illegal pot is a huge cash empire for the growers and dealers and a source of funds for all the cop operations on the other side. It’s essentially the same thing with insurance industry ownership of health care. We can’t have universal care because the gatekeepers wouldn’t get their very lucrative piece of the action. How things work in 2009 America, land of the free.

Thomas Grossi is just another guy caught under the wheels. The Soviet Union died of institutional corruption and constipation, economic, political, and moral. Ours is on the same path.