YES: FEDERAL CRUSADE BRUTALIZES ILL PEOPLE

The war on drugs keeps getting bigger and meaner. Just when you think the
tide is beginning to turn, someone in charge takes it a step further. What
happened in California last month could happen in Washington soon.

On Sept. 5, Drug Enforcement Administration agents armed with automatic
weapons raided a hospice on the outskirts of Santa Cruz because it grew and
used marijuana for its patients, most of them terminally ill.

The founder and director, Valerie Corral, who uses marijuana herself to
control debilitating seizures as a result of head trauma following a 1973
car accident, was taken away in her pajamas. Suzanne Pfeil, a paraplegic
patient suffering from postpolio syndrome, was told to stand up and then
handcuffed in bed when she could not. All the plants were destroyed.

Of all the medical-marijuana clubs, this was the one most true to the
hospice spirit. It was a collective, run on a nonprofit basis. Valerie and
her husband had created a place that brought peace, love and some measure
of freedom from pain to those who came. Like the Brompton Cocktails found
in British hospices, which can contain heroin or morphine, cocaine, alcohol
and other pharmaceutical ingredients, the medicine was unconventional but
effective.

Valerie's hospice was legal under California law, a product of Proposition
215, the 1996 ballot initiative in which 56 percent of voters endorsed the
legalization of marijuana for medical purposes. She was and is a member of
California Attorney General Bill Lockyer's 1999 medical marijuana policy
task force. Her hospice was run openly with cooperation from state and
local authorities.

The DEA's raid, and the clear directive from the Bush administration and
Attorney General John Ashcroft to assault and close this facility and
others, is a travesty of justice - one that did much to terrorize American
citizens and absolutely nothing to protect or improve their health, welfare
or safety.

More than two-thirds of Americans believe that marijuana should be legal
for medical purposes. Medical-marijuana initiatives have won in all eight
states where they've been on the ballot, and would likely win in all but a
handful. The Canadian government is taking steps to make marijuana
available to patients north of our border.

Federal drug policy now lies in the hands of those who might best be
described as the John Birchers of the drug war. Today's drug-war
politicians are out of step with the public but they don't care. They're on
their own crusade, one in which marijuana is as sinful as miscegenation was
to the Southern racists.

They're also practitioners of the big lie. "On the face of it," says John
Walters, director of the federal Office on National Drug Control Policy,
"the idea that desperately sick people could be helped by smoking an
intoxicating weed seems ... medieval. It is, in fact, absurd."

Never mind thousands of reports by patients and doctors, dozens of studies
and the National Academy of Sciences' conclusion that marijuana is
therapeutically effective for a number of painful, chronic and terminal
medical conditions for which pharmaceutical drugs are often ineffective or
introduce negative side effects.

The hundreds of thousands of Americans who use marijuana for medical
reasons, and the doctors who care for them, deserve a hearing in which they
can defend their use of this unconventional medicine. They deserve the
opportunity to give sworn testimony, and to confront the sworn testimony of
those who persecute them. That's a job for Congress.

The raid on the Santa Cruz medical marijuana facility was, of course, about
more than marijuana. It's part and parcel of the same insanity that drives
the bigger war on drugs ... one that now incarcerates more people for
drug-law violations in the United States than all of Western Europe (with a
much larger population) incarcerates for all crimes; one that prefers to
sacrifice tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars rather than
make sterile syringes legally available to reduce the spread of HIV and AIDS.

More than that, it provides insight into the potential abuse of police
power in another war without end on which we have now embarked. Ashcroft
ordered a raid on a medical-marijuana hospice not because he had to, but
because he possessed both the will and the power to do so. A Congress and a
country preoccupied with many other concerns barely noticed.

Is the Santa Cruz raid, and more generally the war on drugs, a preview of
what lies ahead in the war on terrorism? Is the future one in which
increasingly empowered and emboldened federal police agencies intimidate,
arrest and even terrorize not just those who pose true threats to security,
but also those who challenge little more than the moralistic convictions
and political prejudices of power-holders in the nation's capital?

I live for the day when our children will look back on the drug wars of
today the way we now look back on Jim Crow and the Palmer raids after World
War I, the Japanese American internment camps of World War II and the
McCarthyite persecutions of the 1950s. That is my moral crusade, one shared
by more and more other Americans as well.