JUDICIAL HIGH IN CALIFORNIA

Long live California, even if we aren't always sorry we don't live there.
The news two days ago was something on the order of a Whiskey Rebellion
mounted by Californians who want to smoke their cigarettes, dammit, and to
hell with that new law that makes smoking illegal except in your own
cellar. Where will it end? The scent of rebellion has reached New York
City, where the mayor has hesitated to sign the new law making it illegal
to advertise cigarettes within a thousand feet of a school-building. Do we
have the beginning of a national movement?

And of course California is the crucible of the medical marijuana movement.
That mess makes the Augean stables look like spilt tea. What happened is
Proposition 215, passed in November of 1996. What it says is that a doctor
can authorize in writing or orally the use of marijuana by any patient
seeking relief from the assorted pains marijuana usefully addresses; and
authorized patients may cultivate their own supply of marijuana. The law
has been criticized for reasons implausible and plausible. It is, really,
quite dumb for lay critics of marijuana to prattle on about how there are
other means (pills) to bring equivalent relief to those who suffer. That
question is as easily disposed of as taking the testimony of one or one
hundred people who have tried the pill without effect, but get relief from
smoking marijuana. On the other hand it is obviously true that people who
egged on Proposition 215 professing only concern for the afflicted are,
many of them, just plain rooters for marijuana legalization.

Which brings the story to Peter McWilliams. I have for him the reverence
you have (those of you who use word processors) for the person who
introduced you to the computer. He wrote a book about computers so lucid
and engaging it became a best-seller. He went on to become a syndicated
columnist on cyberworld, but simultaneously he pressed other pursuits,
poetical, photographic, and philosophical. He is the absolute Number One
anarchist in America on matters having to do with personal conduct. He has
paid a heavy price for pursuing his passions, suffering now from AIDS and
from cancer.

Now Peter McWilliams is a publisher (Prelude Press) whose books have made
ten appearances on the New York Times best-seller list, and this time
around he retained one Todd McCormick to do a book on marijuana growing --
for the afflicted. Mr. McCormick proceeded to grow, in a pasture behind a
little house in Bel Air purchased with money advanced by McWilliams, not
one marijuana plant but four thousand. McCormick had had experience in
Amsterdam and was engaged in writing a book on the general subject. Bang!
Six thirty in the morning, nine DEA agents crash into McWilliams' house
finding him at work on his computer. They simultaneously tell him he is not
under arrest and handcuff him. They spend three hours going over every
piece of paper in his house (they find one ounce of marijuana, which is
within the California legal limit) and walk away with his computer. That is
the equivalent of entering the New York Times and walking away with the
printing machinery.

Well, the ACLU, which is right twice a day, is on to the McWms' ((sic))
case and is asking the right questions and there will be interminable
arguments and counter-arguments, and a certain amount hangs on the outcome,
given that a finding of guilt on all counts including conspiracy to
manufacture and sell marijuana could put McWilliams away with a life
sentence and a four million dollar fine. There are those who believe that
is going too far; on the other hand there are also those who believe that
24 hours in the cooler is also going too far, to say nothing of nine agents
at 6:30 A. M. barging into your house with handcuffs.

There is, obviously, a judicial shortcircuit in play here. California says
something that sounds like Okay. On the one hand there is the federal war
on drugs, with General Barry McCaffrey up there like George S. Patton
defying all obstacles to pressing his war. The difference is that Patton
succeeded and McCaffrey is not succeeding and never will. Anthony Lewis of
the New York Times reminds us that in 1980 the Feds spent $4 billion on the
drug war, now $32 billion and the number of people in jail on drug charges
went up by the same multiple of eight: from 50,000 to 400,000. How to proceed?

Not, one hopes, with more dawn break-ins and removal of computers. Peter
McWilliams reports an ironic turn. For his illness he smokes every day. But
after you do that for a few weeks you cease to get a high. Marijuana
becomes just something that stops nausea, eases pain, reduces interocular
pressure, relaxes muscles, and takes the "bottom" out of a depression. So
where do we go from here? To jail?