IN SANTA CRUZ, AN OFFICIAL HANDOUT OF MEDICINAL POT PROTESTS

The Action Comes After Federal Drug Authorities Busted A Local Marijuana Club

SAN FRANCISCO -- Officials in the ultra-liberal seaside town of Santa Cruz
may not be marijuana smokers themselves, but on Tuesday they became pot
purveyors with a political cause. In a display of defiance triggered by a
recent federal bust of a local medical marijuana club, Mayor Christopher
Krohn and numerous City Council members met outside City Hall to join
workers from the Women's Alliance for Medical Marijuana in dispensing the
drug to sick patients.

Several hundred residents filled the town's City Hall plaza to cheer
speakers and throw an old-fashioned anti-government rally. Santa Cruz Vice
Mayor Emily Reilly said suppliers drew names from a hat to symbolically
hand out pot prescriptions to a dozen patients who would have normally
picked up their medication in private Tuesday. Each time the drug was
dispensed, she said, the crowd went wild.

"What was best were the speeches," Reilly said. "There were medical
marijuana attorneys, doctors and even a county supervisor. And the message
was about love and healing and trying to alleviate suffering."

Six of seven council members appeared, along with Krohn. But Richard Meyer,
a Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman in San Francisco, was not amused.

"We're dismayed that the City Council and the mayor of Santa Cruz would
condone the distribution of marijuana," he said. "I don't know what they're
thinking, but they're flaunting federal law. And we here at the DEA take
violations of the law very seriously."

Marijuana--medical or otherwise--is illegal under federal law. But under
California law, the drug is legal if it is recommended by a doctor.

Meyer would not say whether DEA agents had attended the rally and would not
discuss whether any arrests had been made. Police referred all media calls
to City Hall on Tuesday, but local authorities said they did not plan to
arrest anyone who showed up with a marijuana prescription. Reilly said she
saw no federal officers on the ground, "but there was a helicopter overhead
that we assumed was full of them."

On Sept. 5, federal agents raided a Santa Cruz medical marijuana
collective, arrested three people and confiscated 130 plants. The move was
met with outrage by residents of this surfers' haven and college town 75
miles southwest of San Francisco. Four years before state voters approved
Proposition 215, allowing marijuana for medicinal purposes, Santa Cruz
residents--by a margin of 77%--approved a measure ending the prohibition of
medical marijuana. For years, Santa Cruz authorities have cooperated with
local collectives, helping set standards for medicinal marijuana use,
issuing IDs and looking the other way as suppliers provided free,
organically grown marijuana.

No one answered the phone at the Women's Alliance for Medical Marijuana on
Tuesday, but a recording stressed that the event was not a "free pot
giveaway" and that the drug would be distributed only to "certain patients
with support of many city officials." The message described Tuesday's
gathering as a "wonderful, quiet and orderly vigil in honor of seriously
ill and dying patients." Several other states have legalized medical
marijuana, and Meyer said all those areas were possible sites of similar
DEA raids.

"Like the officials in Santa Cruz, I'm sure they know that federal law
supersedes state law, and under federal law, marijuana is illegal," he
said. "Drugs are not something to joke about, especially the
city-sanctioned distribution of marijuana." Reilly said: "We don't think
it's funny either.

We take this issue very seriously."