MEDICAL MARIJUANA GROUP WANTS SEIZED PLANTS BACK

SACRAMENTO - A medical marijuana collective near Santa Cruz went on the
offensive Tuesday, asking a federal judge to order the return of 167
marijuana plants seized in a raid by federal drug agents.

The unusual legal motion, filed in San Jose, was based on a states' rights
constitutional defense of California's medical marijuana law that is
expected to find its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The federal government will fight the motion "tooth and nail," said Richard
Meyer, spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, who said he
believed the request to be the first of its kind.

"Our job is to take dangerous drugs off the streets, not to put them back
on the streets," he said.

The case grew out of a DEA raid three weeks ago on the Wo/Men's Alliance
for Medical Marijuana.

Agents arrested the collective's founders, and brought to a head the
dispute between California, which legalized marijuana for medical use by
initiative in 1996, and the federal government, which banned it by an act
of Congress in 1970.

Californians in droves, including some state and local civic leaders,
stepped forward to support the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana and
its founders, Valerie and Michael Corral, who were released without charges.

On Tuesday, a team of volunteer lawyers led by Santa Clara University law
professor Gerald Uelmen took the next step, demanding return of the seized
marijuana plants to the sick and dying alliance members who were counting
on it for a year's supply of medical relief.

"The medicinal marijuana that was seized is not contraband because its
cultivation and use was authorized by state law," says the legal motion.

The motion was based on recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions under the
states' rights 10th Amendment. In those decisions, the high court struck
down federal laws that banned guns near schools and made violence against
women a federal crime.

The Supreme Court said the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution,
on which both laws relied, did not give Congress the power to interfere
with non-economic activities or those confined within a state's borders.
The Santa Cruz group provides marijuana free to its 250 carefully screened
members.

The 10th Amendment argument for Proposition 215 also has been raised in a
case that arose in Oakland. The argument was rejected this year by a
federal district judge in San Francisco and now is before the 9th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Oakland's medical marijuana
cooperative in 2001 but did not decide the 10th Amendment issue.