Woman receives lifetime ban from cruise line over "illegal" item
A 42-year-old mother has received a lifetime ban from Carnival Cruise Line voyages, after she attempted to board one of the company's ships with a seemingly innocent item.
Melinda Van Veldhuizen, a nurse practitioner and mother of two from Texas, said she was treated "like a criminal" when cruise ship employees found a bag of the CBD “sleep tight” gummies in her luggage while at a port in Miami.
Melinda told local news station WPLG she packed the gummies to help her get some sleep on the August trip she had planned to take with her family to celebrate both her 21st wedding anniversary with her husband and her son’s senior year of high school.
Ms Van Veldhuizen was taken to a separate area of the security check-in when the discovery was made, and was questioned by Carnival security and police for two and a half hours.
The mother was blocked from boarding the ship, and her husband and son also disembarked as they didn’t want to go on the cruise to Aruba, Curaçao and the Dominican Republic without her.
The family had spent just under $9,000AUD on their planned vacation, Ms Van Veldhuizen’s attorney Daren Stabinski told the Washington Post.
CBD is a compound commonly derived from hemp that doesn’t cause impairment or a “high,” and is different from marijuana's mind-altering substance of THC.
CBD is becoming more readily available across the globe, and is used to treat ailments from chronic pain to sleeplessness.
In most parts of the US, CBD products that contain no greater than 0.3 per cent of THC are legal.
According to WPLG, Ms Van Veldhuizen’s gummies contained less than 0.01 per cent THC.
Despite the product being legal in the state Ms Van Veldhuizen was departing from, the hemp product is prohibited by Carnival Cruise Lines.
“While certain CBD products used for medicinal purposes may be legal in the US, they are not legal in all the ports we visit and therefore are also considered prohibited items,” its website states.
Soon after Ms Van Veldhuizen was forbidden from going on the cruise she paid for, she received a letter from Carnival informing her she was banned from all Carnival ships for life.
The letter signed by Captain Rocco Lubrano states that she will “not be permitted to sail on-board any Carnival Cruise Lines vessel in the future.”
“This decision was based on your actions on the current cruise, which were a violation of the ship rules, interfered with the safety and/or enjoyment of other guests on the ship or caused harm to Carnival,” Mr Lubrano wrote.
Ms Van Veldhuizen said she has taken more than a dozen Carnival cruises over the years and was freaked out by the letter and the whole experience, and was not expecting such a severe reaction.
“I thought it was one of those situations where you’re like, ‘Oh shoot, I left a bottle of water in my backpack; you gotta throw it away,’ kind of thing like that happens at TSA,” she said.
Ms Van Veldhuizen is pursuing an internal claim with Carnival, but has threatened to sue if her situation isn’t resolved “appropriately” and hired Mr Stabinski to assist her.
“Out of all the cases I take, this one was just specifically outrageous,” Mr Stabinski said.
Image credits: WPLG