Repeat offender Richard Rahurahu Eru avoids jail for growing 49 cannabis plants

A judge has told a pensioner to take up a part-time gardening job to pay his fines – but warned him against the sort he was doing that landed him in court.

A pensioner has been told to take up a part-time gardening job to cover his fine after his cannabis crop landed him in court.

Richard Rahurahu Eru, 65, pleaded not guilty to cultivating a commercial quantity of controlled plants for sale, but guilty to the offence of cultivating cannabis in the Mount Gambier District Court on Friday.

“I cultivated cannabis for personal use,” Eru told Judge Geraldine Davison.

Police searched his Binnum home near Francis in the state’s South-East on March 5, 2020, first finding dried cannabis and a bong in the lounge room before discovering 49 plants, most of which were immature, throughout the property.

Repeat offender Richard Rahurahu Eru avoids jail for growing 49 cannabis plants. Picture: Facebook

After initially claiming those in his vegetable garden were wild and pretending another in a pot was a tomato plant, he told police he had grown them for personal use to manage his seizures.

Accepting Eru’s admission of the lesser charge, the prosecutor said the maximum penalty was $2000, two years imprisonment or both.

She argued for a term of imprisonment and opposed a suspended sentence based on his history of cannabis-related offending including four charges of producing between 2006 and 2008 and driving offences in 2015 and 2018.“

The defendant hasn’t been deterred previously,” she said

Defence lawyer Nick Vadasz said Eru, who grew up in New Zealand where he left school at 14, married at 16 and sustained a head injury at work at 19 leading to seizures, had been living in Australia for 20 years.

He said the pain had led the accused to self-medicate with cannabis for most of his adult life and was making attempts to have the drug medically prescribed.

“One day his cousin gave him a smoke of cannabis,” Mr Vadasz said.

“That smoke took away the pain. He described cannabis as saving his life.

“He has only recently became aware that cannabis can be prescribed.”

Living on a farming property, Mr Vadasz said the lack of phone reception would make it difficult to have Eru serve time on home detention.

Judge Davison said she had no intention of sentencing him to jail, instead a significant fine would act as a deterrent.

“It would be very unusual, in this day and age, to imprison someone that cultivated cannabis plants for their own use,” she said.

“He might have to do some more part-time gardening, presumably not the same sort of gardening he was doing in the allegations.”

Judge Davison fined Eru $900.

“You have been warned in the past,” she said.

“It is illegal to grow cannabis, even for your own personal use.

“If you need it for seizures or for any other medical condition that you might suffer from, the only legal way to obtain it is by prescription.”