WORCESTER —  Angel Molina, his lawyer says, “is perhaps the poster child” for why decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana in Massachusetts may have been a bad idea.

Mr. Molina, 26, was sentenced yesterday in U.S. District Court to 2 years in federal prison. He pleaded guilty in June to two counts of distribution of crack cocaine.

The Fitchburg man was rounded up with more than 20 people in December in a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program called Operation Northern Kings. The U.S. attorney’s office said that while there was no evidence that Mr. Molina was a street gang member, the evidence showed that members of the Latin Kings gang profited from the drug sales.

Raymond A. O’Hara, his lawyer, said Mr. Molina’s chronic use of potent marijuana has been a source of his problems. Despite opposition by major elected officials and law enforcement personnel to a referendum to decriminalize possession of less than an ounce of the weed, Mr. O’Hara said, Bay State voters approved the measure in November 2008.

Marijuana does not have the psychological or physical addictive qualities of heroin or cocaine, he said, but chronic use of pot typically leads to lack of motivation and ambition, poor performance at work or school, and general laziness. That happened to Mr. Molina, his lawyer said.

He told Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV that was not the only problem of his client, who had suffered nearly constant emotional abuse from his alcoholic father. Still, with his lack of criminal record and his devotion to his child and her mother, and his recent pot-free record, Mr. Molina is unlikely to re-offend, Mr. O’Hara argued.

Had the case gone to trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney David H. Hennessy said, the government would have proved that on July 16, 2009, Mr. Molina sold 27.9 grams of crack cocaine to an informant working with FBI and DEA agents in exchange for $1,100. On Aug. 31, 2009, the defendant again sold the informant 27.9 grams of crack cocaine, for $1,150.

The second sale was video-recorded inside a car.

Congress recently changed the law so that a mandatory minimum sentence of 5 years for possession of crack cocaine is triggered not by the sale of 5 grams but by 28 grams. Mr. Molina was the beneficiary of an indictment that did not aggregate the sales at 56.8 grams, but counted them individually, with each sale being a tenth of a gram below the weight triggering the mandatory 5 years.

The sentence also is below the old advisory sentencing guideline of 57 to 71 months and the newer guidelines of either 30 to 37 months or 37 to 46 months.

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