IT'S ABOUT COMPASSION, NOT CRIMINALS

Her mornings are never that good anyhow because she wakes up with a leg
that is withered from polio. Still, this morning was truly bad. She opened
her eyes and saw five federal agents pointing rifles at her head. "Get your
hands up!" one of them yelled.

"Get out of bed!" yelled another.

She told them she was sorry, but she couldn't because she was crippled.
They put her in handcuffs and again told her to get up. Again, she said she
couldn't because she used leg braces and crutches and she needed her hands
for those.

"Eventually," Suzanne Pfiel says, "they went after the others. They left me
lying there, handcuffed in the bed, for an hour."

This was in Santa Cruz, Calif., earlier this month, at a hospice co-op
facility where 80 percent of the people are terminally ill. Does it sound
like a place that federal agents need to burst into and raid like something
out of "Silence of the Lambs"?

This is our war on drugs.

Pfiel's offense - and that of the others in her hospice - is that they use
and grow marijuana for medical purposes. This is perfectly legal in Santa
Cruz and in the state of California. But under federal law, marijuana is
still considered a controlled substance.

So you have dying patients who are pitied by their city and state and
outlawed by their country.

Maybe that's why they call it dope.

Now, let me say this. I don't smoke marijuana. I never have.

I have no personal agenda - except one. Compassion.

Patients sick enough to need marijuana deserve such compassion. They are
trying to relieve their pain. To ease their nausea. They are trying to win
a few precious minutes from cancer or AIDS or epilepsy or arthritis. Would
you not want that for your ailing mother? For your terminally ill child?

Yet there is a notion among critics that these patients are locking the
doors and throwing a Cheech and Chong party, mocking the government's naivete.

Nothing could be dumber - or further from the truth. I have spent a lot of
time with sick people whose only relief is what marijuana gives them.
Believe me, they would gladly trade their disease for your sobriety. Any
day. Any minute.

"I have post-polio syndrome," Pfiel says. "It involves an incredible amount
of muscle and nerve pain. I'm allergic to most pharmaceutical drugs. The
marijuana relieves my pain and helps me cope.

"For most of us, that's the situation. We're not getting high. We're trying
to feel better. Isn't that what medicine is supposed to be about?"

The mayor of Santa Cruz was appalled at the federal agents who busted the
co-op. So was the California attorney general. But the Drug Enforcement
Administration clung stubbornly to its credo.

"[Our] responsibility is to enforce our controlled-substances laws," said
Asa Hutchinson, the DEA administrator, "and one of those is marijuana."

So despite the state's blessing and the obvious non-threat of this small,
compassionate place, here came the feds, guns a'blazing.

And you thought it was the stoners who couldn't think clearly.

This is hypocrisy. Last week at a football game, a father got his
14-year-old son so drunk on beer the kid had to have his stomach pumped.
But we sell beer openly. I know of people who sneak cigarettes to lung
cancer patients. Nobody stops them.

But for some reason, when the sick and dying seek relief through marijuana,
they are dopers, potheads or, even worse, criminals.

Mornings, when you're sick and dying, are tough enough. You don't need guns
pointed at your head.