"...BUT HE'S GOOD ON OUR ISSUE"

Pro-marijuana activists from the Beltway to Oaksterdam have been
forwarding, with comments expressing praise and thanks, George
Melloan's Feb. 21 Wall St. Journal op-ed piece, "Musings About the
War on Drugs." Six of seven members of the WSJ editorial board agree
with Melloan, according to reliable sources. Letters to the paper
have been heavily supportive of his libertarian and tactical
arguments, which included:

"The drug war has become costly, with some $50 billion in direct
outlays by all levels of government, and much higher indirect costs,
such as the expanded prison system to house half a million drug-law
offenders and the burdens on the court system. Civil rights sometimes
are infringed. One sharply rising expense is for efforts to interdict
illegal drug shipments into the U.S., which is budgeted at $1.4
billion this fiscal year, up 41% from two years ago.

"A good case can be made that U.S.-sponsored efforts to eradicate
coca crops in Latin America are winning converts among Latin peasants
to the anti-American causes of Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuela's
Hugo Chavez. Their friend Evo Morales was just elected president of
Bolivia mainly by the peasant following he won by opposing a
U.S.-backed coca-eradication program... More seriously, Mexico is
being destabilized by drug gangs warring over access to the lucrative
U.S. market.

"Milton Friedman saw the problem. To the extent that authorities
curtail supplies of marijuana, cocaine and heroin coming into the
rich U.S. market, the retail price of these substances goes up,
making the trade immensely profitable--tax-free, of course. The more
the U.S. spends on interdiction, the more incentive it creates for
taking the risk of running drugs."

The activists' admiration for Melloan was typified in a letter from
Howard J. Wooldridge of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition that the
Journal published March 7: "As a police officer, I worked the
trenches of the war on drugs for 18 years. Mr. Melloan's comments
were right on. I would add that as we chase pot smokers, etc., we
have less time to arrest DUIs, pedophiles and people who fly
airplanes into buildings. As a detective, 75% of my case load was
generated by drug prohibition. Drug gangs now plague medium and even
small towns. What part of this policy is benefiting America? None of it."

To the right of Wooldridge's letter (and a complementary one from
Jack Cole, also of LEAP), ran George Melloan's latest op-ed, a
four-column exercise in speculation contending that Saddam Hussein
was involved with the bombing of the World Trade Center; that the
bombers mailed anthrax to recipients in the US (before taking off);
and that the CIA is preventing the American people from learning the
relevant facts!

Melloan wants the Administration to make public "captured documents
that *might* reveal what schemes Saddam Hussein had cooked up to
retaliate against the U.S. for the indignities thrust upon him during
and after his 1991 Desert Storm defeat. Those included a UN embargo,
arms inspections, a no-fly zone and occasional bombing attacks."
[U.S. doctors estimate that 500,000 Iraqis, most of them children
deprived of medicines, died as a result of these
"indignities."] According to Melloan, "Saddam *may once have*
offered sanctuary to bin Laden himself," and "CIA denials to the
contrary, his emissary *may have* met with hijacker in chief Mohammed Atta...

"*If Saddam was complicit in the plot,* what more likely suspect
could you find than a dictator who had used poison gas against both
Iran and his own people and who *was suspected by the United Nations*
of having caches of lethal chemicals? Those truck convoys that set
out for Syria before the 2003 invasion *easily could have* carried
the entire supply. *Is it so implausible that* Saddam's envoy Ahmed
Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, an Iraqi government official who worked
at the Iraqi embassy in Prague, *might have* slipped terrorist Atta a
packet of weaponized anthrax at the rendezvous that the CIA claims
never happened?"

Melloan thinks "a cabal within that dysfunctional bureaucracy [the
CIA!] is doing all it can to undermine a Republican president... It
has a lot to do with the political guerrilla warfare that (Valerie
Plame's) Democrat husband is waging against the administration."
Melloan's whacko op-ed ends with a revealing reference to "the jackal
mentality that afflicts the Beltway when a president's poll numbers
have been beaten down. One of the shillelaghs being used for that
purpose might become far less effective *if we ever learn that*
Saddam was part of the 9/11 plot." A shillelagh is a cudgel. The man
is saying that the CIA has withheld the truth about Saddam Hussein's
villainy so that George W. Bush's popularity could be "beaten down,"
presumably by the liberal media.

Is it pure coincidence that Melloan is musing about an end to the War
on Drugs as Bush's approval rating slips to 30%? Or do he and his
friends on the Wall St. Journal editorial board sense it's time to
place a libertarian fig-leaf over the capitalist marauder's weaponry
to conceal his true nature and ultimate objectives? In the instant
that drug-legalization advocates praise George Melloan for supporting
their agenda, they confer credibility on his, which is global control
by capital enforced by the U.S. military. Credibility cuts both ways.

Denney's Law

Previous columns have quoted detailed reports on the investigation of
Dr. Philip A. Denney's practice by undercover law enforcement
operatives, and the rationale provided to the Redding
Record-Searchlight by the perps. Because the investigation was
focused on a local dispensary, said the police chief and the district
attorney, Denney wasn't investigated at all.

Denney says that the small spate of publicity has resulted in
numerous calls to his Redding office from patients concerned about
the sanctity of their records. "One patient drove all the way from
Truckee to request that we return his files, which he then drove away
with." It made Denney rethink his original decision to publicize the
intrusion of law enforcement into his practice. He'd been put in a
bind, he realized: "either risk raising the fear level of my
patients, or ignore the abuse of my rights -and theirs."

Denney says that the number of patients calling to make appointments
did not decline in the week after his situation was written up. "In
general, the circle of patients keeps widening. Prop 215 was like a
rock thrown into a lake and the ripples keep expanding as a result of
face-to-face, person-to-person conversations. With every passing day,
more people hear from somebody they know and trust -somebody they're
prepared to believe-that cannabis really does have medicinal effect,
that it worked for them, that the side effects are relatively mild.
Law enforcement cannot stop this ever-widening circle of
understanding. That's where the new patients keep coming from."

Denney's observation should have meaning for all political activists.
In any movement that profoundly challenges the status quo, adherents
are organized one-on-one. In the medical marijuana movement, ever
since the passage of Prop 215, the core organizers have been the
doctors themselves, confirming for some 200,000 patients that there
is a physiological basis for the relief they've attributed to
cannabis. The patients become organizers as they explain to friends,
loved ones and acquaintances that their cannabis use really is
medicinal and proving by their own example that getting a doctor's
approvable is do-able.

Some influential activists would have us believe that the perfect
soundbite, broadcast in the right markets, direct-mailed to the right
addresses, delivered by pre-recorded message to the right phone
numbers, will transform America. This is an illusion advanced -not
coincidentally-by those who claim special expertise in "media
messaging," "controlling the spin," et cetera. The truth is, the way
to bring new adherents to a movement is one-on-one conversation.

If any young folks out there are thinking about building a party to
change our society from greed-based to egalitarian, bear in mind
Denney's Law: Real movements get built person-to-person.

Kubby's Out of Jail

Steve Kubby was let out of Placer County jail Monday after serving 40
days of a four-month sentence. Good behavior and overcrowding at the
jail were the ostensible reasons for releasing him; the fact that
he'd lost 25 pounds in custody may have factored into the decision.

Kubby has a rare form of adrenal cancer that has been in remission
for some 30 years thanks to cannabis use, he and his doctors are
convinced. After Kubby and his wife and two daughters left for
Vancouver after his conviction in 2000 for possession of a peyote
button and a psychedelic mushroom. The Kubbys, who lived in South
Lake tahoe, had been busted for growing 256 plants in their basement;
a Placer County jury voted not to convict on cultivation-for-sale charges.

Kubby's prescription for Marinol was honored during his recent stint
in jail, and his blood pressure, which had spiked sharply at first,
was brought under control. He left singing the praises of Sheriff Ed
Bonner and the jail staff who, according to Kubby, were much less
cynical about medical marijuana than their counterparts had been in
1999, when he first served time.

In a letter to his jailers seeking to distance himself from the
negative publicity his incarceration had generated, Kubby wrote that
he had "developed a profound respect for the professional and highly
dedicated staff and officers here." He still faces charges in
connection with failing to appear at his sentencing in 2001, but as
of this writing, Steve Kubby is free man, and full of hope for the future.