FEDERAL LOGIC HAS GONE TO POT

Mysteries and Guidelines

Steve McWilliams, the medical marijuana activist, is more provocateur than
politician. The San Diegan has smoked a pile of prescription pot -
sometimes on City Hall's steps.

So perhaps his judgment has been dulled by doobies.

But what's the Bush administration's excuse for its contradictory
reasoning? While running for president, then-Gov. Bush was asked about
medical marijuana. "I believe each state can choose that decision as they
so choose," he said.

California, then, would appear to be Bush's Exhibit A. In 1996, the voters
overwhelmingly approved Proposition 215, clearing the way for doctors to
prescribe pot.

Last Friday, though, McWilliams was arrested for growing marijuana for
patients.

"The DEA is not singling these people out," Donald Thornhill Jr., a DEA
spokesman, told the Union-Tribune's Jeff McDonald and Marisa Taylor. "We're
just enforcing the law."

Would that be the state law that Candidate Bush said should govern this
issue? Or the federal law that President Bush now insists is paramount?

Mysteries and guidelines

If Proposition 215 runs afoul of federal statutes, it also violates common
sense. While it clearly intended to allow patients the right to possess and
use marijuana, the law raised more questions than the first chapter of an
Agatha Christie mystery.

Where were these ailing people supposed to shop for marijuana?

How much could they possess?

Oh, and by the way, who should receive an Rx for THC? Soon after
Proposition 215's passage, McWilliams showed me his list of pot-worthy
ailments. As I recall, it ranged from cancer - marijuana has been used to
ease the nausea that accompanies chemotherapy - to "bad day at work."

Last year, San Diego established a task force to answer these questions.
This body includes doctors, lawyers and cancer survivors. For awhile it
included McWilliams, but he resigned this summer.

"This was his issue," said Juliana Humphrey, a lawyer and the task force's
chair. "But once he got into a government arena, Steve didn't know what to do."

If the task force was similarly confused, it found its way, slowly. Members
paused often to consult with the City Attorney's Office and members of the
Police Department's narcotics unit. Yesterday, all these deliberations
resulted in a series of recommendations, delivered to a City Council
subcommittee.

But why bother if Washington is determined to declare Proposition 215 null
and local implementation void?

"I think this makes it even more important that we have guidelines,"
Humphrey said. "Our residents need to know where our police and our city
government stand."

Making a federal case

Although McWilliams left the task force, his cooperative still followed
that group's recommendations. His was a small operation of roughly 25
plants. Surely, no one would make a federal case over it.

Wrong. The feds exhumed a 1999 case, in which police seized 448 plants from
McWilliams' cooperative. Local prosecutors, no doubt aware of Proposition
215's inherent contradictions, had declined to prosecute.

The feds, though, seized on that '99 bust to threaten McWilliams with a
minimum five-year prison term. This isn't about justice; it's about
muzzling an advocate.

"This guy is violating the law, and he's flaunting it," the DEA's Thornhill
said. "He brought this whole thing on himself."

This, from an administration that claims to support states' rights. If
McWilliams was so confused, I'd chalk it up to too many joints. But what
are the feds smoking?