ANOTHER WAY TO WEED OUT DRUG USE

"We will fight the marijuana growers on the land, in the air and on the
water." -- Leader of a Sheriff's Department pot posse

This is war, no doubt about it. The enemy is rooted in the hills. It's them
or us. Take no prisoners.

No sooner does the Valley start growing like a weed than they start pulling
it out. It's that time again, harvest time in the hills, a call to arms
that uproot.

Join the Sheriff's Department, become a weed puller, a weed controller with
a badge.

If there is no longer much gold in them thar hills, there is an abundance
of marijuana, millions and millions of dollars worth of it, if you can
believe the weed controllers' estimates, pulled and destroyed, never to see
the streets or some suffering soul with HIV. A drug off the market, indeed.

It's reefer madness in the new millennium.

About the time that sheriff's deputies up and down the Valley were cleaning
and jerking bushels of the enemy out of the ground, a federal judge in San
Francisco was seeing the error of his previous ways and ruling that a bit
of the weed may be good for what ails one, which is what the voters of the
state seemed to say in the last election.

Perhaps it's high time government also saw the error and confessed that war
is hell, even the war on drugs, that it might be better to start treating
pot farmers the way it does a lot of other rugged individualists with a
plot of fallow ground for something to grow on. Pay them for not planting
the stuff. If the policy works for other cash crops, why not cannabis sativa?

Face it, friends and foes, the war on drugs is a losing -- if not already
lost -- proposition, says Dave Fratello. He was in Fresno last week
campaigning for what he hopes will be a winning proposition -- Prop. 36 on
the November ballot. If it passes, certain adult, nonviolent offenders
would receive drug treatment instead of prison sentences. It's a
progressive, and, its backers believe, more effective way of fighting the war.

Fratello, communications director for the initiative, made his pitch at the
Indian Health Services office, where director Mary Martinez called for more
services and treatment on the local level to help keep families together
rather than separated by prison bars. Prop. 36, she said, would help fill
the bill.

Treating the addictions of drug users, they believe, is clearly more
effective than simply putting them behind bars for a short time and then
kicking them loose and back to the streets, which adds up to Three Strikes
and counting.

The focus of the measure, Fratello said, is simply health instead of jail,
a trade-off that in time could reduce prison operating costs in the state
by up to $25 million a year. And who could argue with that?

Prison guards could. They are dead set against it, of course, preferring to
stay the course, which means more arrests, which means more prisoners,
which means more prisons, which means more guards, which means more money
the guards union can throw at the politicians who make the laws that are
broken. And around we go.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch the war rages -- in the air, on the sea, on
the beaches...

Eli Setencich is a Bee columnist. Contact him by e-mail at eli@fresnobee.com.