HAS GOVERNMENT LIED TO AMERICANS ABOUT MARIJUANA?

I couldn't agree more with Matthew Everson's letter of Oct.1, "Anti-drug
ads are viewed as ridiculous and misleading."

Everson asks, "What else have they been lying to us about?"

The cruel federal campaign against the medical use of marijuana is another
example. With DEA agents routinely raiding California medical marijuana
providers, despite the fact voters legalized the option in November 1996,
California's Attorney General Bill Lockyer wrote a letter of protest to DEA
chief Asa Hutchinson and other Bush Administration officials.

Hutchinson's reply included the following, "Your repeated references to
'medical' or 'medicinal' marijuana illustrates a common misperception that
marijuana is safe and effective medicine. The scientific community has
never determined this to be the case."

While Hutchinson knows that is a lie and even that in 1988 a DEA
Administrative Law Judge found that, "Marijuana, in its natural form, is
one of the safest therapeutically active substances known. In strict
medical terms, marijuana is safer than many foods we commonly consume," but
apparently feels that if federal bureaucrats decree that marijuana isn't a
safe and effective medicine, the lies becomes truth.

Marijuana prohibition has warped our once free country so badly that the
votes of American citizens have become irrelevant to those who are supposed
to govern on our behalf. A government that lies to its own people about a
God-given herb MUST be lying about a lot of other things too. God help us all!

Gary Storck,

Madison