PROSECUTOR'S WELCOME DECISION FIRST STEP IN LONG JOURNEY

You've probably heard already. Placer County District Attorney Brad
Fenocchio threw in the towel against Steve Kubby Friday, ending the
county's two-year drugs-for-sale prosecution of the former Libertarian
candidate for governor and his wife, Michele.

Better yet, Fenocchio also made the sensible decision to drop charges
against former Rocklin dentist Michael Baldwin and his wife, Georgia.
The Baldwins faced a retrial this month on cultivation-for-sale
charges, after a jury deadlocked last year on the question of their
innocence.

Facing a recall petition by critics of the county's arrest-first
policy toward medical marijuana, Fenocchio offered an olive branch in
the motion to dismiss, promising "to work with law enforcement,
citizens and health-care providers S to establish guidelines" for the
number of allowable plants.

If that effort leads to a policy all sides can abide by, then Placer
County will have taken a giant step toward implementing the will of
voters who approved Proposition 215, or the Compassionate Use Act, in
1996.

But before any such happy ending is possible, Placer prosecutors and
law enforcement will go through a rocky year or more, as those who
were prosecuted unfairly and others who were targets of ill-advised
raids by a sheriff's anti-pot team seek retribution in court.

At this moment, seven lawsuits are working their way through the court
system, with additional suits by Kubby and Baldwin all but a certainty.

As reported by Journal Staff Writer Gus Thomson on today's front page,
Judge John L. Cosgrove reduced the two Steve Kubby's felony
convictions - for a mushroom stem and peyote buttons - to
misdemeanors.

In overruling the objections of stalwart Deputy District Attorney
Christopher Cattran, Cosgrove called Steve Kubby's felony conviction
for possession of the peyote buttons "a little strange," since
cultivation of the hallucinogenic cactus - arguably the more serious
offense - is now a misdemeanor. (Cattran's response: "Yeah, it does
seem peculiar, but there are lots of laws in these [statute] books
that seem peculiar.")

Cosgrove cited Kubby's hitherto spotless criminal record and lack of
aggravating circumstances to reduce the psilocybin mushroom charge to
a misdemeanor as well, calling it a "common-sense interpretation" of
the "wobbler" law against the psychedelic mushroom that allows the
charge to be either a felony or a less-serious misdemeanor.

With his ruling, Cosgrove restored Steve Kubby's political career. And
Kubby, who used marijuana to control blood-pressure symptoms from a
rare adrenal cancer, has ideas about running for office again.

Kubby was instrumental in placing Prop. 215 on the ballot, then became
an outspoken defender of the medical-marijuana initiative once it came
under attack by local police and prosecutors. He finished fourth in
California's 1998 race for governor, during which an anonymous letter
was sent to Lake Tahoe police claiming that Kubby was financing his
political campaign by selling marijuana.

Too bad the drug task force didn't look for evidence of illegal sales
first before turning the lives of the Kubbys upside down in search of
clues of possible wrongdoing. The mere confirmation that Kubby was
growing marijuana should not have justified police entering their home
on a fishing expedition.

That is a hard lesson for police and prosecutors to
learn.

Take, for example, the astonishing dragnet for possible marijuana
growers conducted by the Placer County Sheriff's Office anti-marijuana
team.

As reported by Wally Reemelin in the League of Placer County
Taxpayers' bulletin, the team jotted down hundreds of license plates
of customers of a Sacramento County nursery supply company, Green Fire.

The deputies then obtained the customer addresses through DMV checks,
acquired their utility bills from PG&E, SMUD and Roseville Electric,
then sought search warrants for the residences of those customers with
higher-than-expected electricity consumption.

The scores of raids resulted in dozens of arrests and, now, seven
lawsuits.

I've heard that supervisors ordered a halt to the raids during a
closed-door meeting last year, although no county official has made
that news public. But one thing is certain: the raids did come to a
stop.

Yet, the supervisors' direction may have come too late to spare the
county millions of dollars in potential settlements. Or to spare
Fenocchio the anxiety of a possible recall election. (A signature
drive is currently under way.)

But it is a bitter pill for many in law enforcement to swallow. After
prosecutors attempted to deny him access to marijuana while serving
his probation, Steve Kubby called the request "extreme bad faith."

"If I can't qualify for medical marijuana, who the hell can?" Kubby
asked.

That's a question best answered, not by law enforcement and
prosecutors, but by physicians, scientists and the California
Legislature.