THE HOSPICE RAID AND THE WAR ON DRUGS

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.

Last week, DEA 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 was 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 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 its attorney general 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 have 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. Like the
Southern racists who blocked civil rights reforms in the 1950s and
1960s, 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
or homosexuality is to today's religious fundamentalists.

They're also practitioners of the big lie. "On the face of it,"
says John Walters, "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
everything; 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/AIDS.

More than that, it provides insight into the potential abuse of
police power in another war without end on which we have now
enbarked. The attorney general of the United States 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 the First World War, the Japanese-American internment
camps of World War II, and the McCarthyite persecutions of the
1950s. That is my moral crusade, and one shared by more and more
other Americans as well.