'GURU'S' TIRADE ON MARIJUANA EARNS RESPECT

The "Guru of Ganja," marijuana grower Ed Rosenthal, is an
unprepossessing guy with a pug nose, a gray suit, a slight belly. He
looks like an accountant. But put a microphone before him and he
buries any concept of Mahatma Gandhi.

Twenty minutes after U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer let him off
Wednesday with a $1,000 fine and a day's jail sentence for marijuana
growing, a red-faced Rosenthal denounced the judge, calling him
corrupt and demanding his resignation.

Then he went on to undermine the medicinal marijuana defense that his
lawyers and supporters had so carefully constructed for him.

"The federal government makes no distinction between medical marijuana
and any other kind of marijuana," he said before a crowd of supporters
in a parking lot across the street from the federal building in San
Francisco. "They're right. All marijuana should be legal!"

Just for good measure, he insulted the people working in the
courthouse. "This has become the harm center of San Francisco," he
shouted.

A Little Respect

I say you have to respect a man like this. Not like him, but respect
him. Yes, he's intemperate. Yes, he's unfair. Yes, he's full of
himself. But he has the quality of being unyielding -- and maybe
that's what was needed in this particularly silly case. You wanna
prosecute me? Fine. Bring it on.

To understand his role, you have to know the stakes: To his lawyers
and supporters, this case was about the right of a decent man in
Oakland who followed a city ordinance that let him provide marijuana
to sick people.

To legal scholars, it was a contest between the anti-drug Bush
administration, which brought the case, and California Proposition
215, the medicinal marijuana initiative.

But those battles were only the surface warfare. What was going on in
Judge Breyer's 19th-floor courtroom No. 8 Wednesday morning was a huge
salvo aimed at decriminalizing marijuana -- and maybe even making it
effectively legal.

That salvo goes well beyond medicinal marijuana. I don't doubt there
are ill people who genuinely benefit from pot. One of the most
remarkable features of Rosenthal's case was that a cadre of the jurors
who convicted him on federal charges of cultivating more than 100
plants showed up Wednesday on his behalf, still irritated that they
had not been allowed to hear evidence of how Rosenthal helped the sick.

But the feds, for all their overzealousness in bringing this case,
have this much right: There's a slippery slope between making
marijuana available medically and making marijuana available, period.

Would a woman with severe back problems benefit from a toke every now
and then? Well, maybe. Would she like it even after her back stops
hurting? Why not?

Courageous Call

In what has to be called a courageous decision, Judge Breyer was
delivering an unmistakable message to federal prosecutors that he
didn't think much of their case.

Giving someone a day's sentence in a case of this magnitude is like
awarding a class-action plaintiff $1 in a multimillion-dollar civil
lawsuit.

So that has to raise the questions: Just how vigorously should our
nation's marijuana laws be enforced? And should they be changed? The
answers are not very and probably yes.

The weight of expert opinion is swinging away from the idea that
marijuana leads to harder drugs. A study by the non-profit Rand Drug
Policy Research Center debunked the notion that pot was a "gateway"
drug that led to cocaine and other drugs. All in all, alcohol probably
costs more lives.

In Canada, Parliament is moving toward passing a law to decriminalize
pot -- essentially making it the equivalent of a traffic fine. It's
not a bad model here. We can avoid the political hassle of legalizing
it. But more important, we can avoid prosecutions like Ed Rosenthal's.
As an added bonus, maybe we can escape his firebrand rhetoric.