FEDS GO AFTER MEDICAL POT WHILE REAL PUSHERS GO FREE

Some wit once defined a fanatic as a person who redoubles his effort just
as he loses sight of his objective. That wit must have been thinking of
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and Drug Enforcement Administrator Asa
Hutchinson.

Their objective is supposed to be to chasing drug traffickers who sell
dangerous drugs like methamphetamines and heroin to children. Instead, they
are raiding plots that supply medical marijuana to grandmothers with cancer
under the terms of California's Proposition 215.

The state's growing anger over Ashcroft's fanaticism crystallized this
month after DEA agents raided a medical marijuana cooperative in Santa Cruz
that operates responsibly with the support of local officials and police.

City and state officials, doctors, lawyers and patients are right to be
angry. As state Attorney General Bill Lockyer spelled out in a recent
letter to Ashcroft and Hutchinson, the raids, conducted without consulting
local and state authorities, are doubly outrageous.

For one thing, they are unethical abuses of law enforcement power,
conducted without any expectation that the targets can or will be
successfully prosecuted.

Even more important, every hour a federal agent spends on chasing medical
marijuana is an hour not available to California's more serious drug
problems. Medical marijuana, Lockyer correctly noted, "represents little
danger to the public and is certainly not a concern that would warrant
diverting scarce federal resources away from the fight against domestic
methamphetamine production, heroin distribution or international terrorism."

Every time Ashcroft and the DEA go after medical marijuana users, life gets
a little easier on traffickers in methamphetamine and heroin.