GOVERNMENT SHOWS NO COMPASSION FOR MEDICAL POT CONSUMPTION

More Than Ten Years After California's Compassionate Use Act Was
Passed by Voters, State and Local Officials Are Still Collaborating
With Federal Law Enforcement to Undermine It.

On the morning of January 13, 2004, Tehama County prosecutor Lynn
Strom unexpectedly announced that the state of California was
dropping charges against Cynthia Blake and David Davidson for
possessing and growing cannabis with the intent to distribute. While
the two medical marijuana patients waited in the courtroom, Strom and
the defense attorneys disappeared inside the judge's chambers to
discuss the motion to dismiss. Moments later, more than a dozen
sheriff's deputies pounced on the hapless couple, handcuffed them,
and shoved them into an unmarked police car waiting outside the
courthouse in the Sacramento Valley town of Corning. They were
already en route to jail in Sacramento when Strom informed their
lawyers that the state was bowing out because the Feds were taking
over the case.

It was a devastating blow for Blake, a retired Federal Reserve
employee, and her sweetheart, Davidson, a retail shop owner.

Both in their early fifties, they were booked on federal drug charges
and transferred to the jurisdiction of the Eastern District office of
US Attorney McGregor Scott. If convicted, they each faced a mandatory
minimum of ten years to life in prison for exercising a right they
thought they had gained with the 1996 passage of Proposition 215, the
California ballot measure that legalized cannabis for medical purposes.

Both had a physician's recommendation to ease their ailments with
marijuana, and neither had a criminal history. They had been tending
three dozen pot plants in a remote garden, which they shared with
other patients; their attorneys insist that no money had exchanged
hands for the herb. But none of this would matter in federal court,
which treated all marijuana as equally illicit, making no exceptions
even for the seriously ill.

The well-coordinated Blake-Davidson hand-off was not the first time
local authorities in California had turned over a medical marijuana
case to federal authorities. But it is perhaps the most dramatic
example of ongoing, secret collusion between various levels of
government to prevent the implementation of the Compassionate Use
Act, as Proposition 215 was called on the ballot.

For the past ten years, state and local officials sworn to uphold the
state ballot measure have instead proven to be willing -- sometimes
eager -- accomplices in a concerted U.S. attack on a state law. Now,
a half year past its tenth birthday, the landmark California law
remains under siege.

Within days after Prop 215 was enacted in the fall of 1996, top
California law enforcement officials huddled privately with America's
drug war high command in Washington, DC, where they plotted to
sabotage a voter initiative they were unable to defeat at the ballot box.

On Dec. 3, 1996, in Sacramento, 300 district attorneys, police
chiefs, sheriffs, and narcotics officers attended an "Emergency All
Zones Meeting," at which they were advised, basically, to continue
arresting and prosecuting as before.

Then-Attorney-General Dan Lungren and his deputies maintained that
the new law did not shield marijuana suspects from arrest but merely
provided them with an "affirmative defense" to invoke at a trial.

Under Lungren's "narrow interpretation," local narcotics officers
could exercise unilateral power in deciding if med-pot growers had
more plants than they, the officers, believed justified by their
medical condition.

Enforcement of the Compassionate Use Act varied dramatically across
California's 58 counties.

Where ballot support was strongest, especially in the San Francisco
Bay Area, patients could obtain locally issued ID cards and purchase
their medicine from storefront dispensaries that had begun opening
even before Prop 215 passed.

But beyond an hour or so drive from San Francisco, in the Other
California -- Red-State California, as it were -- local police and
prosecutors conducted a reign of terror against patients and
caregivers that went largely unnoticed by the state's metropolitan press corps.

Operating with federal anti-marijuana grants that increased by 50
percent in the first five years after passage of Prop 215, a dozen
regional task forces worked with DEA and IRS partners to target
marijuana growers regardless of medical use. "Prop. 215 might fly in
San Francisco, but not here," a Placer County deputy told the target
of a 1998 arrest and prosecution.

Nowhere did local authorities repress medical users more than in the
Eastern District, the sprawling federal court district spanning
California's San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys and the Sierra
Nevada, where Blake and Davidson faced charges.

Drug War strategists had pegged physicians as the weakest link in the
med cannabis supply chain.

Gen. Barry McCaffrey, Clinton's drug czar, took aim at the doctors
first, threatening to revoke the licenses of those who approved
cannabis use by patients.

A group of physicians and patients, with help from the ACLU and the
Drug Policy Alliance, promptly sued the U.S. government on free
speech and privacy grounds.

The suit, called Conant v. McCaffrey, resulted in a federal
injunction issued on First Amendment grounds upholding the doctors'
right to discuss cannabis as a treatment option.