MARIJUANA -- AMERICA'S MOST PROFITABLE PLANT NOW BRINGS AN EARLY WARNING OF
SUBVERTED CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS, BRAINWASHED JURIES, BLOATED FEDERAL POWER,
JUDICIAL RACISM, AND HAMSTRUNG LAWYERS.

We all appreciate that California voters passed Proposition 215, which
allows for medical usage of marijuana for seriously ill Californians: a
person with a recommendation from a doctor is entitled to grow and use
marijuana. Now legal authorities at all levels of law enforcement admit up
front that they are doing everything they can to de-actualize that law.
That is, they will arrest people who have doctors' recommendations. They
will seize plants grown by terminally ill people and turn them over to the
district attorney. Most of the time, if it's a bona fide medical-use case,
district attorneys won't prosecute, but the medicines--the marijuana plants
and the marijuana in smoking form--are seized and never returned.

Worse than that, they outlaw the marijuana clubs and the people who grow
for them. They give lip service to the legalization of milk, and then
outlaw the cow.

Through the supremacy clause, federal authorities have claimed the right to
interdict these organizations. Prosecutors have applied mandatory
sentencing minimums using the federal system, which does not recognize 215.
They have sought and accomplished the closure of a number of clubs through
federal injunctions.

The feds, claiming separate-sovereign status, are stultifying the will of
the electorate. That's a slap in the face of the democratic process, and a
slap in the face of the law-and-order approach that 215 has established.
They always say, "If you don't like the law, then change it!" Then when you
finally change just one of the untold numbers of onerous laws, they won't
actualize it, they won't give it full faith and credit, they won't even
honestly enforce it.

Back in the sixties, we believed that marijuana was going to be
decriminalized. We're now in the latter part of the nineties. For the small
percentage of decriminalization that applies to medical use, law
enforcement and often district attorneys won't give us the benefit of the
law. They're very punitive and very retaliatory. They don't like the law,
and they're not fulfilling the mandate of the electorate.

I'm painting a very grim and pessimistic picture of what's going on in the
judicial process. Normally, I'm an optimistic, positive-oriented person.
But I think that any criminal-defense practitioner will tell you that the
war on drugs is a false premise, an illusion. Under this rubric in the last
decade or so, we as a culture have been effectively stripped of
constitutional rights. Consider motions to suppress evidence, where the
defendant claims unlawful seizure, or that his right to privacy has been
invaded, or that the police had no probable cause or no search warrant. In
the sixties and early seventies, we would win four out of five of these
cases because law enforcement typically failed to meet legal requirements.
Now, we're lucky to win one out of twenty. Judges do not want to apply
constitutional standards with full force and vigor against law enforcement,
because they're fearful of being viewed as lenient in this war on drugs.

Jurors have become mad dogs, they have been so conditioned by media and
police propaganda. I got a case in Boston where the jurors believed,
almost, that marijuana was shot into your veins like heroin. They had no
idea what marijuana was, they were merely recipients of propaganda. In a
political drug case where law enforcement's word is pitted against a
private citizen's word, attorneys will now say, "You have to establish five
reasonable doubts; one reasonable doubt won't do it." Juries want to adopt
the prosecution version. They've been brainwashed. They believe that crime
is rampant, that drugs lead ultimately to robbery. We're in a very, very
constitutionally threatened atmosphere based on the mass mentality of the
populace.

I can still win a jury trial. At this office, we do marijuana case after
marijuana case, and we win many of them. But it's nothing like the sixties,
when all levels of society showed a robust interest in actualizing
constitutional rights and expanding the common denominator for justice. It
is fairly dismal out there now. We're hopeful that the pendulum will swing
back. We look at things like elections (in this state, the governor's,
attorney general's, and senatorial races). Ultimately, we look to the media
to promote more honesty so the general populace isn't spoon-fed
war-on-crime propaganda. We look to other levels of media, to the film
industry, to change a lot of its crime or police hero-worship plots and
narrative. If we can't turn public attitude, law enforcement, and the
courts around, we are heading toward the worst repression in our country's
history.

Tony Serra has been the most effective jury lawyer on marijuana and other
drug-related cases in the United States. He helped keep Hacsi Horvath, one
of our staff members, out of jail when he was entrapped in an LSD sales
caper. He has been an outstanding spokesman for the integrity of the
judicial process, independent of political influence. Other segments of
this conversation appeared in Whole Earth No. 95.