MEDICAL MARIJUANA

Doctrine Of States' Rights Provides Answer

Responding to a federal raid last September on a small pot farm about 15
miles north of town, the city and county of Santa Cruz, Calif., Wednesday
filed suit in federal court against Attorney General John Ashcroft and the
DEA. The city wants federal agents to stay away from the farm, whose owners
have now been deputized by the city to cultivate and possess medical
marijuana under a city ordinance that allows the distribution of the drug
to sick and dying people.

Last fall, as ill cancer patients on crutches stood by in tears, federal
agents used chainsaws to cut down 165 marijuana plants at the Wo/Men's
Alliance for Medical Marijuana, arresting the founders, Valerie and Michael
Corral.

Although voters in California -- as well as Alaska, Arizona, Colorado,
Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon and Washington -- have gone to the polls and
authorized the plant to be grown and distributed to sick people on a
doctor's recommendation, federal law has treated marijuana as a dangerous
narcotic, in the same class as heroin, since 1937.

The September raid outraged local officials and many community members in
the coastal town, where police and sheriffs work closely with medical
marijuana users and growers, and the Compassion Flower Inn -- a bed and
breakfast inn for medical marijuana users -- operates openly just a few
blocks from downtown.

DEA spokesman Richard Meyer in San Francisco said raiding medical marijuana
clubs and farms is the DEA's duty. "Our goal is to seize illegal drugs and
arrest the perpetrators and bring them to justice," he said.

On a purely humanitarian level, the federal laws are misguided, responds
Judy Appel, a Drug Policy Alliance attorney who helped write the lawsuit.

"We cannot just stand by and watch the harassment of people who are sick
and dying," she said. "We hope the court will see the injustice and
inhumanity of the federal government's actions, and restore these patients'
rights to treat their severe pain with the medicine that works best for them."

Since the Constitution delegates to the federal government no power to
regulate medical practice, such regulation must either default to state
authority under the 10th Amendment -- meaning that under our current U.S.
Constitution, state law trumps federal law in this regard -- or else
medical practice becomes a Ninth Amendment activity not subject to
government intervention, at all.

Either way, the federal government here is wrong as a matter of
constitutional law, as well as by any measure of humanity, common sense and
compassion.

On all these grounds, the federal courts should now demonstrate the
"jealous balance of powers" which the founders promised us would always
motivate one branch of the federal government to rein in the excesses of
the others, and now firmly instruct the DEA that more compassionate state
laws such California's take precedence over any federal pronouncements on
this issue.