JAIL TERM URGED FOR MAILING JOINTS TO FRENCH MPs

PARIS, March 25 (Reuters) - A state prosecutor urged a Paris court on
Wednesday to jail the leader of a group that mailed a marijuana cigarette
to every French MP along with a plea to ease France's tough drug laws.

Prosecutor Bernard Pages said Jean-Pierre Galland and his Paris-based
Collective for Information and Research on Cannabis (CIRC) had committed a
serious crime.

He urged the court to convict Galland of ``encouraging drug use'' and
called for an 18-month jail sentence, one year of it to be suspended.

CIRC officials, boasting that the hand-rolled joints were made exclusively
from marijuana grown in France, had said they wanted only to encourage
debate in parliament about decriminalising marijuana use.

``This was a symbolic and political act rather than a question of law,''
Galland told the court.

One member of parliament, Charles Amedee of the centre-right Union for
French Democracy, joined the proceeding as a civil plaintiff.

A second MP, Socialist Yann Galut, told the court he favoured a public
debate on decriminalisation. He stated however that he had not smoked the
joint mailed to him.

Some seven million of France's approximately 60 million inhabitants have
tried marijuana at least once and about two million are regular users,
according to official estimates.

Hundreds of French residents are jailed each year and thousands are fined
for use, possession or sale of marijuana, according to the organisation.