THE THRASHING OF A DYING DINOSAUR'S TAIL

On Sept. 5, fearless federal drug warriors raided the farm of the Wo/Men's
Alliance for Medical Marijuana about 15 miles north of Santa Cruz, Calif.,
handcuffing the owners and taking chainsaws to 160 plants -- the farm's
entire fall crop.

Valerie and Michael Corral were arrested on federal charges of intent to
distribute marijuana, though it's unlikely they'll ever face trial.

Who were these particular hardened drug lords?

The Corrals helped write the provision in California's Proposition 215 that
allows patients and their caregivers to cultivate their own medicine. The
Corrals "work with local authorities to grow and distribute their pot to
people with doctors' recommendations to use marijuana," explains The
Associated Press.

"Valerie has been very open and very consistent in what she's doing up there
and how the marijuana is handled," local sheriff's spokesman Kim Allyn told
USA Today.

Valerie Corral is the movement's ''Mother Teresa," explains Ethan Nadelmann,
executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, and her group is seen as a
model nationally.

Ms. Corral, who suffers seizures from a head injury incurred in a car
accident, began smoking marijuana after conventional drugs failed to control
her symptoms. "Her disorder is responsive to marijuana and not to other
things," says her doctor, Arnold Leff, who served as a deputy director of
the White House drug abuse office during the Nixon administration. "This is
a very safe herbal product. So if it works, it ought to be used."

The nonprofit WAMM dispenses only marijuana it grows organically. Marijuana
is free to its 250 members who contribute labor to the co-op. About 85
percent of the members are terminally ill cancer and AIDS patients.

USA Today now puts the number of recent DEA "medical marijuana" raids at
eight, including one in which they hauled away the records of 5,000 medical
marijuana users from a doctor's office near Sacramento. (Chalk up
doctor-patient confidentiality as yet another casualty of this
ever-expanding, always inspiring War on Drugs.)

What federal officials are trying to do, of course, is put back into its
bottle the genie of Proposition 215, which legalized marijuana for medical
use on a doctor's recommendation.

We were all taught in high school civics class that, "If you don't like the
law, the solution is to get the majority of your neighbors to vote to change
it." Californians have done that. In 1992, 77 percent of Santa Cruz voters
approved a measure ending the medical prohibition of marijuana. Four years
later, Golden State voters approved Proposition 215, allowing marijuana for
medicinal purposes.

Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon and
Washington have since followed suit.

It would be tempting to say federal drug warriors have taken leave of their
senses, walking into a public-relations nightmare by singling out marijuana
being grown specifically for the terminally ill under the supervision and
with the approval of local authorities. But that would imply the drug
warriors ever had a firm grip on reality -- or a concern for the opinion of
decent folk -- in the first place.

In fact, these bizarre weed police enforce edicts enacted in the 1930s based
on uncorroborated testimony by redneck Southern sheriffs that marijuana,
cocaine and opium facilitated the seduction of white women by oversexed
Mexicans, Negroes and Chinamen, while giving these minority Lotharios "the
strength of 10." And the "federal supremacy" they claim to be defending was
abrogated and overruled by the 10th Amendment, which specifies that any
powers not specifically delegated to the federal government remain with the
states.

Does the Constitution grant to the federal government any power to restrict
the commerce in any drug or medicine? Of course not. That's why -- when the
federal government last legitimately (albeit disastrously) attempted a drug
prohibition, from 1919 to 1933 -- it had to win ratification of a
constitutional amendment banning the manufacture and sale of alcohol.

''My hope is this bust represents the federal government pushing too far,
the overreach that shocks the conscience of a lot more people, especially
those in Washington who have seemed so callous to date,'' comments Ethan
Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance.

Indeed, that "level of outrage" may finally be surfacing.

In a letter to chief federal drug weasel Asa Hutchinson and U.S. Attorney
General John Ashcroft, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer condemned
the bust as a waste of law enforcement resources and a cruel step against a
group that presents minimal danger to the public, dubbing such raids
"punitive expeditions."

By Sept. 17, The AP was reporting: "Cutting ribbons, making declarations,
passing out marijuana to sick people, it's all in a day's work if you're the
mayor of Santa Cruz." DEA spokesman Richard Meyer said he was "appalled" as
Mayor Christopher Krohn and his colleagues on the Santa Cruz City Council
announced plans to help hand out pot to medical marijuana users at City Hall
that day.

An unidentified helicopter hovered over City Hall while the big marijuana
hand-out was underway -- but no federal official dared to actually roll in
and bust the mayor.

Although it may be small comfort to the current victims, there's a good
chance what we're seeing here are the spastic thrashings of a dying
dinosaur's tail.

"Unexpected chinks are appearing in the once seemingly insurmountable legal
wall the government has erected against marijuana," writes J.D. Tuccille, a
senior editor of The Henry Hazlitt Foundation's Free-Market.Net, in the Aug.
22 Review-Journal.

"Not only are Western voters continuing their efforts to ease access to the
drug by people with chronic ailments, there are signs that a more
laissez-faire attitude may also be extended to recreational users. Even in
the halls of power in Washington, D.C., important questions are being asked
about the morality and practicality of the federal government's drug
prohibition policies."

At WAMM's co-op overlooking the Pacific, Mike Corral now walks among the
bare rows in the decimated marijuana garden, the stumps of once healthy
plants protruding from the dirt, and wonders what will become of the co-op,
USA Today reports.

"We'll keep our fingers crossed and hope that sometime between now and March
we'll be able to replant."