A 23-year-old Montana man who was mauled after he smoked marijuana and entered a pen to feed a grizzly bear at Great Bear Adventures park where he worked was awarded workers' compensation benefits, reports the Flathead Beacon.

Brock Hopkins sustained serious injuries, including a dislocated kneecap and $70,000 in medical expenses when he was attacked by the bear in 2007. He is lucky to be alive.

The owner of the park, Russell Kilpatrick, argued that Hopkins was merely a volunteer and not an "employee" of the park entitled to workers' comp and that his use of marijuana was a "major cause" of the attack, reports the Flathhead Beacon. 

Hopkins admitted that he smoked marijuana from a pipe on the morning he was attacked by the bear. He had the marijuana pipe in his pocket, but placed it on a storage shed outside the bear pen before entering with the food, whereupon the attacked occurred, reports the Flathead Beacon.

“I became very very angry [when I discovered the marijuana pipe outside the pen] because I then knew what had happened," Kilpatrick wrote in a statement to the court. "In my opinion Brock could not resist one last time of harassing the bear with his habit of blowing smoke in their faces for God only knows what reason and in direct defiance of my telling him NOT to disturb them!!!”

The judge sided with the pot-smoker.

“When it comes to attacking humans, grizzlies are equal opportunity maulers; attacking without regard to race, creed, ethnicity or marijuana usage," Judge James Jeremiah Shea is quoted as saying in the Flathead Beacon. "Hopkins’ use of marijuana to kick off a day of working around grizzly bears was ill-advised to say the least and mind-bogglingly stupid to say the most. However, I have been presented with no evidence by which I can conclude that Hopkins’ marijuana use was the major contributing cause of the grizzly attack.”

It appears the judge found Kilpatrick, the park's owner, to be less than credible.

“Kilpatrick’s testimony that he gave Hopkins money on multiple occasions, ‘out of my heart’ coincidentally while Hopkins was performing ‘favors’ for Kilpatrick at the bear park is not credible,” Judge Shea stated. “There is a term of art used to describe the regular exchange of money for favors – it is called ‘employment.’”