WAR ON MEDICAL POT A WAR AGAINST REASON

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.

Early this month, 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 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.

Corral 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.

Corral'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.