CITY JOINS MEDICAL POT USE LAWSUIT

Court Action Aims To Prevent Further Raids On Marijuana Cooperative

The city and county of Santa Cruz, a medical marijuana cooperative and
seven patients sued federal officials Wednesday to prevent further raids
like the one conducted upon the cooperative last year.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, claims the
plaintiffs' civil rights were violated by the Drug Enforcement
Administration's raid of the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana.

Attorney General John Ashcroft, acting DEA administrator John B. Brown III
and White House drug czar John Walters should be barred from ordering any
more such raids and should have to pay compensatory and punitive damages
for the Sept. 5 WAMM raid, the lawsuit says.

"It's quite significant, it's really unprecedented -- there haven't been
any prior lawsuits where local governments have joined in," said Santa
Clara University School of Law Professor Gerald Uelmen, the plaintiffs'
co-counsel.

Santa Cruz County Supervisor Mardi Wormhoudt said she's "proud the county
has the opportunity to raise these issues in a formal way." WAMM co-founder
Valerie Corral, one of the case's plaintiffs, called the city's and
county's participation "monumental, it's historic."

"I don't think anything like this has happened before, and it speaks to the
amount of responsiveness on the part of the politicians who represent our
community," she said.

California voters in 1996 approved medical marijuana medicinal use.

and the city and county of Santa Cruz have passed ordinances supporting and
protecting such use. Federal law still bans all cultivation, possession or use.

WAMM's farm at Corral's home in Davenport, north of Santa Cruz, was among
several California medical marijuana sites the DEA raided in 2001 and 2002.
Agents seized and destroyed WAMM's marijuana plants, but no criminal
charges have been filed.

The DEA has said it's merely enforcing federal law. Government officials
wouldn't comment on the pending lawsuit Wednesday.

This lawsuit's plaintiff patients are Corral, who has epilepsy; Eladio V.
Acosta of Watsonville, undergoing chemotherapy for throat cancer; James
Daniel Baehr of Santa Cruz, suffering pain from extensive, terminal cancer;
Michael Cheslosky of Aptos, who has AIDS; Jennifer Lee Hentz of Palo Alto,
undergoing chemotherapy for lymphatic cancer; Harold F. Margolin of Santa
Cruz, who has cervical spondylosis, or arthritis of the neck, and Dorothy
Gibbs of Santa Cruz, who has post-polio syndrome. Gibbs, 93, is WAMM's
oldest member.

The patients claim the federal officials violated their Fifth and Ninth
Amendment rights to control the circumstances of their own deaths; to
ameliorate pain; to maintain bodily integrity; to preserve life, and to
consult with their physicians regarding treatment and then act on those
recommendations.

The federal officials overstepped their authority because Congress can
regulate only interstate commerce, the lawsuit says: "Congress has made no
finding that the intrastate cultivation and use of medical marijuana by
seriously ill patients with the approval of their physicians, as permitted
by California's Compassionate Use Act, has any effect whatsoever on
interstate commerce."

The raid also violated the state's and county's Tenth Amendment right to
implement their own laws, the lawsuit claims. And the lawsuit claims WAMM
and its patients should be deemed immune from future raids because WAMM has
been deputized under Santa Cruz's medical marijuana ordinance, and federal
law says duly authorized officers can't be prosecuted.

Corral said WAMM "worked hard at being accountable and credible" under
local and state laws, so the raid was "a great affront to the democratic
process" as well as "an injustice to people who are sick and dying."

Uelmen said the federal officials "really did cross a significant line when
they took on a group with this level of local support, law enforcement
support, and a real compassionate agenda. This is like a hospice serving
the needs of dying people.

"What really made WAMM unique was the squeaky-clean way they were running
the operation, the kind of closed system they had established so there
really wasn't any leakage, any commercial activity -- they're not selling
the stuff. This is a cooperative of patients growing their own medicine."

Wormhoudt said "the county is supportive of the efforts WAMM makes to
provide very ill people with an opportunity to mitigate pain and manage
symptoms."

"If they did not do that work, in many cases, it would be the county people
would need to turn to," she said. "During very hard budget times, that
would be a difficult thing for us to do -- we can barely meet the demand
for services we already have."