"Leave states alone on medicinal marijuana"
by Susan Estrich

The Drug Enforcement Agency made a mistake this week, which may have
a major impact on its fight against medicinal marijuana.
At 6 o'clock Monday morning, federal agents entered the offices of
Flower Therapy in San Francisco's Mission district, seizing 331 marijuana
plants, growing equipment and financial records. It was the first federal
raid of a facility established in the wake of Proposition 215, the
California initiative enacted last fall that makes it legal under state law
to use marijuana for medicinal purposes.
From the point of view of those who have opposed Proposition 215 as
a Trojan horse for drug legalization, they could not have picked a worse
test case.
The official administration position on Proposition 215 has been
that the voters were duped into supporting medicinal marijuana because we
were too stupid, sympathetic or shortsighted to understand that what we
were really voting for was drug legalization.
Drug czar Barry McCaffrey, joined by leading conservatives such as
William Bennett, campaigned against 215, denounced its passage, and pledged
to ignore it. In each case, he warned that the issue was not really AIDS
and cancer patients but access to all drugs by the broader population, our
children included.
But the issue at Flower Therapy really is AIDS and cancer patients.
According to its spokesman, Gary Johnson, himself an AIDS patient
with a prescription for marijuana, Flower Therapy worked with the San
Francisco Police Department as well as the Health Department in structuring
its operations. It did not open its doors until after Proposition 215 was
passed, and it screens every client to ensure that they are legitimate
patients seeking marijuana for medicinal use. Flower Therapy has a business
license and a milliondollar insurance policy Johnson told reporters,
evidencing its determination "to run a medicinal marijuana operation that
was above reproach."
Flower Therapy made no secret of what it was doing. The impetus for
Monday's raid was a television report with "great visuals (that) showed the
whole operation," DEA spokesman Stan Varga told reporters. "We were really
interested in the visuals...a largescale, hydroponic marijuana cultivation."
Federal law draws no distinctions between medicinal and other users,
or between businesses such as Flower Therapy and drug dealers who hang out
in malls. And no state has the right to create defenses to federal law.
Under federal law, the DEA plainly had a legal right to raid the offices of
Flower Therapy, and federal prosecutors could clearly seek indictments of
its owners and operators, although finding a jury willing to convict might
be more difficult.
But the real question is not whether federal authorities have a
right to ignore Propositions 215, but whether they have enough respect for
the will of the people and principles of federalism to let Californians try
to make it work.
At least since Willie Horton, few Democrats have been willing to
risk any position that might be caricatured as "soft on crime." And
conservatives, with very few exceptions, seem to have no difficulty
renouncing first principles of limited government and federalism not to
mention individual liberty when the challenge is framed as being tough on
drugs.
Yet if ever there were an area where these conservative principles
should be applied it is to the question of marijuana, particularly medicinal
marijuana. The result of treating every crime and drug issue, even
medicinal marijuana, as a test of toughness is bipartisan paralysis that
only the people can address.
There is obviously a legitimate concern that the legalization of
medicinal marijuana could increase teenage access or lead to broader abuse
of other drugs. But the federal government which has spent the last
three decades waging a "war" against drugs that has cost billions and failed
miserably by every measurable standard plainly has no monopoly on good
answers to drug abuse.
Why not allow states the freedom to act as Justice Brandeis'
"laboratories for experimentation" in testing out different approaches to
the prohibition of drugs? We couldn't do any worse.