I have a mixed response to the remarkable report that The City may
distribute cannabis to patients ( "Hallinan: Pot will be available," Metro
section, March 15).

Part of me is grateful to live in proximity to a city with San Francisco's
maverick tradition, which so often in the past has placed it in the
vanguard of humane social change.

Part of me is saddened that our national government seems irrevocably
committed to an anti-marijuana witch hunt so lacking in intellectual and
scientific rationale as to be utterly contemptible. It's also saddening
that the ferocity of that witch hunt has frightened the majority of my
colleagues into being accomplices in silence, and prevents the Legislature
from enacting laws that could enable Proposition 215 [for medical use of
marijuana] to work as California voters intended.

Finally, it's disgusting that demagogues like the state attorney general
[Dan Lungren] feel empowered to subvert the will of the people by appealing
to an equivocating and irrelevant state Supreme Court.

The bold entrance of municipal government on the side of reason and decency
is eagerly awaited.

Thomas J. O'Connell, M.D.
San Mateo