DANGEROUS IDEOLOGIES

John Ashcroft would have loved my grandfather. A World War II vet and
Baptist minister, my grandfather didn't play cards because they were
"of the devil." He even went so far as to throw his own stepson out of
the house for using marijuana in the early 1970s--a step I assume
would warm the tiny little hearts of anti-drug warriors everywhere.

Then, in 1974, my grandfather's doctor discovered prostate cancer and
gave him six months to live. My grandfather began chemotherapy and,
unable to eat, dropped to less than a hundred pounds. At six feet
tall, he looked like a skeleton as he painfully shuffled around the
house. His doctor, who had prescribed morphine and other opiates,
recommended cannabis, although he couldn't prescribe it. My
grandfather and his stepson re-formed their bond, broken years
earlier. The same cannabis leaves that once came between them now were
healing both my grandfather and his relationship with his stepson.

My grandfather gained weight and lived six more cantankerous years
until the cancer reappeared and metastasized to his bones. In 1980,
after a long valiant fight, he died at a local Kaiser hospital.

Conservative anti-drug warriors like Lyn Nofziger (an aide to former
presidents Nixon and Reagan) change their stance on medical marijuana
when conventional drugs fail their terminally ill loved ones. Those
who don't have this first-hand experience frequently sound as
compassionate as Santa Cruz City Council candidate Phil Baer who, when
confronted with medical-marijuana patients, said, "I think it would be
noble of them if they felt the pain a little bit and did something for
the higher good." The tone of his statement echoes the compassionate
conservatism of good old Nazi Germany.

Personally, I don't believe that Baer and Ashcroft are Nazis. I
respect and admire law-enforcement officials for the difficult job
they do so well. It's just that I have trouble telling the difference
between the frail, emaciated victims of Nazi concentration camps and
the gaunt, pale cancer and AIDS patients who are the victims of our
misguided, power-hungry government.

What's more dangerous: a drug that Francis L. Young, administrative
law judge for the Drug Enforcement Administration, called "one of the
safest therapeutically active substances known to man," or the
ideologies of those who would use any means necessary to legislate
their own moralities and who would ease imagined fears instead of the
very real pain people suffer each day?

Just say no to dangerous ideologies.