MEET AMERICA'S MARIJUANA MARTYR

He's the Alan Titchmarsh of the pot world, with countless grow-your-own
tomes and a licence to supply for medicinal use. But in what some are
calling a Bush show trial, Ed Rosenthal now faces 40 years in jail. There
are two reasons why the case of Ed Rosenthal has become a cause celebre for
the marijuana-decriminalisation movement.

The first is that, for the past 30 years, he has been the world's foremost
cultivator of cannabis plants, and a pioneer in hydroponic growing techniques.

His many books - from Indoor/Outdoor Marijuana Growers' Guide in 1974 to
the recently reissued Why Marijuana Should Be Legal - have been
international bestsellers. And his advice column, "Ask Ed" - available
online as well as in magazines such as High Times and Cannabis Culture -
has come to be regarded as the Delphic oracle for pot-growers, the
Gardeners' Question Time of getting high.

The second reason stems from the federal government's decision to swoop,
without warning, on both his home and his hydroponic growing laboratory in
Oakland, California in February last year. Rosenthal was charged with
multiple felony counts of manufacture of an illegal narcotic, and put on
trial at the beginning of this year. What the feds did not seem to
appreciate - or care about - was that Rosenthal was growing his plants for
the sole use of Aids, glaucoma and cancer patients seeking relief from
pain. He did so at the behest of the city of Oakland, which in turn was
acting in accordance with California's Compassionate Use Act of 1996 that
permits the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes.

In other words, what he was doing was entirely legal, at least under
Californian state law. But that was not something the court chose to share
with the jury. Rosenthal's lawyers were not allowed to mention the 1996
Act, or the fact that he was acting as a formally enshrined officer of the
city of Oakland. As a result, the jury felt obliged to convict him, even
though several of them wondered during their deliberations just how much of
a criminal he was. As soon as the trial was over and the full truth of
Rosenthal's circumstances became clear to all, five of the 12 jurors staged
an open revolt and demanded that he be granted a new trial. "Last week,"
one of the jurors, Marney Craig, wrote at the time, "I did something so
profoundly wrong that it will haunt me for the rest of my life. I helped
send a man to prison who does not belong there."

It has not quite come to that yet - he is not due to be sentenced until
early June, and the controversy over his case is causing considerable
ructions in the legal system that may yet keep him out of prison - but it
is clear that Ed Rosenthal, on top of his previous celebrity status among
marijuana cultivators, has become a symbol of all that is wrong and
distorted about America's much-ballyhooed War on Drugs.

Essentially, he has become a pawn in an increasingly nasty battle between
the federal government, with its virulently intolerant attitude to illegal
drugs in all forms, and individual states, including California, that have
sought to liberalise the laws around the edges by popular referendum. The
federal government's attitude has become particularly unforgiving under the
Bush administration, which, unlike any administration before it, has used
paramilitary tactics to break up medical marijuana clubs, destroy plants
kept by terminal patients, and arrest people such as Rosenthal who had no
reason to suppose that they had fallen foul of the law at all.

"The feds are coming from totally insane places," an uncowed Rosenthal said
in a phone interview. "A lot of people are frightened about what is going
on in the US - and they should be. Is this Imperial Rome?"

What you think of Ed Rosenthal depends a bit on where you are coming from.
If you are worried about the consequences of increasing marijuana
consumption then he looks like the supreme irritant.

As much as half of the cannabis consumed in Britain is now grown
domestically, according to a new study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation,
and it's a fair bet that the growing fad for both garden and indoor
cultivation has been fuelled by the impeccable advice offered by the pot
world's Alan Titchmarsh.

It was Rosenthal who first guided the indoor-growing movement away from
ordinary fluorescent lights to high-intensity discharge lights.

He helped two generations of home-growers to regulate the nutrients
required in a soil-free environment. More recently, he has pioneered the
cloning of high-quality cannabis.

None of this is good news if you believe that marijuana is a public-health
hazard that needs to be eliminated through effective law enforcement.

On the other hand, if you believe - as many on both sides of the Atlantic
do - that legal crackdowns on marijuana use do far greater social harm than
the drug itself, then Ed Rosenthal starts to look like a veritable guru. As
Oakland's official pot-grower, he was providing medical marijuana clubs
with "starter plants" to provide high-quality product to the sick and
dying. Nobody could have made pot more respectable - the very reason, he
believes, why the Bush administration came after him. "I was a trophy
arrest, and they were going to make a big example out of me," he said. "I
think they have a special priority to try to stop medical marijuana.

As the best-known person, I carry the greatest cultural impact."

In fact, the feds have gone after plenty of other people.

Last September, the Drug Enforcement Administration raided a marijuana club
in Santa Cruz, to the fury of the local authorities who have now filed suit
in federal court demanding damages as well as an injunction to prevent the
DEA from infringing on state affairs again.

Then, in February, federal agents raided 100 homes around the country in
search of bongs and pipe-making materials. They made more than 50 arrests,
even though they found no drugs, and even though, in California and other
states, possession of marijuana pipes is explicitly decriminalised.

Rosenthal is certainly correct, however, in saying that his arrest was the
most spectacular. His treatment has been condemned not only by drug-reform
groups but also by The New York Times and other newspapers. The judge in
his case, Charles Breyer of the US District Court in San Francisco, has
been forced to admit that the outcome achieved by a series of rulings
favouring the prosecution may not stand up to scrutiny on appeal.

When Rosenthal heard banging on his front door in the early morning of 12
February last year, he thought his neighbour was in trouble. "Instead," he
said, "I was greeted by the armed forces of the US, guns at the ready.

They were expecting to find gold and big bank accounts.

Instead, they found a middle-class family." (Rosenthal, who is 59, has a
wife and two teenage children.) They handcuffed him and produced a search
warrant based on apparently false assertions, including the suggestion that
federal agents had been tipped off to the presence of marijuana by the smell.

Starter plants, Rosenthal insisted in court documents that the judge
refused to admit as evidence, have no smell; it is the flower buds that
have the smell.

On top of denying him any opportunity to mount a defence, Judge Breyer also
told the jury that they had no discretion in deciding whether Rosenthal was
guilty. If he had grown the plants - and he clearly had - then they were
obliged to convict him, even in the knowledge that his crimes carried a
minimum sentence of 40 years behind bars. The five rebel jurors now believe
that they were misled on that point, too. Jury nullification - the power to
acquit a defendant if the government's position seems unjust - is enshrined
in the Sixth Amendment, which characterises the jury as "the conscience of
the community".

What Rosenthal's case shows is how the government's War on Drugs - rather
like the analogous war on terrorism - can be used as an excuse to ride
roughshod over every conceivable provision of the criminal-justice system,
even the right of defendants to give their side of the story in court.

As such, it stands as a cautionary tale to any country tempted, like the
US, to take the hardline law-enforcement route on a soft drug. As Rosenthal
writes in his latest book: "No law should be more harmful than the
behaviour it seeks to regulate."

There are signs that the Bush administration has seriously overreached.
Several Californian cities have passed resolutions urging police not to
co-operate with DEA and FBI raids on medical marijuana facilities. It may
all end up in the Supreme Court in Washington. Until then, Ed Rosenthal and
his band of supporters will fight on. "These laws are going to come down,"
he vows, "and this case will be a part of it."