SANTA CRUZ CITY OFFICIALS TO HAND OUT MARIJUANA

SANTA CRUZ - Santa Cruz city leaders plan to take part in a public pot
giveaway next week to protest a recent federal raid of a medicinal
marijuana cooperative that served mostly terminally ill members.

City Councilman Ed Porter said on Thursday he wants to show solidarity with
residents in the beach community located some 70 miles south of San
Francisco who are outraged at the federal raid last week that occurred
without the support or knowledge of local officials.

Federal agents also arrested the cooperative's owners, Michael and Valerie
Corral, who were instrumental in drafting the trailblazing 1996 California
law that allowed patients and their caregivers to grow marijuana for their
own medicine.

"Terminally ill people are being denied the use of marijuana even though
they have prescriptions because the Feds came in here and make a bust,"
Porter said. "I wouldn't be surprised if most of the city council
participates because the whole community is up in arms about this."

The event, which is not sponsored by the city, is expected to take place
outside City Hall on Tuesday. Those wishing to pick up marijuana will need
to show a prescription for the drug, which is legal in California for
medical use, Porter said.

Richard Meyer, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration, said he
was "appalled" by the plan but declined to detail whether federal agents
would be at the event to make arrests.

"We are in shock, we are appalled and dismayed that elected officials would
flaunt a federal law that way," Meyer said. "To us it is saying in Santa
Cruz you are only entitled to obey the laws you agree with."

California is one of nine US states where voters have passed laws allowing
doctors to prescribe marijuana to patients suffering from illnesses ranging
from AIDS and cancer to glaucoma and multiple sclerosis.

Federal law enforcement authorities, however, have taken a far more severe
view of medical marijuana than their local counterparts in the nation's
most populous state and have recently been cracking down on the patient clubs.

The US medical marijuana movement, which gained strength in California
during the height of the AIDS epidemic, also received a setback in 2001
when the US Supreme Court unanimously upheld the federal ban on marijuana.

But California's own state Supreme Court recently took an opposite tack,
ruling for the first time that ailing Californians who use or grow
marijuana with a physician's approval cannot be prosecuted in state
courts--currently the venue for most marijuana cases.