POT RAID DID NOT HAVE TO HAPPEN

LARRY Gerston's facile assessment of the federal/state tug-of-war over
medicinal marijuana (Opinion, Sept. 10) was singularly unenlightening.

Gerston asserts that the federal government ``had no choice'' in its recent
raid on a medicinal marijuana farm in Santa Cruz and that to simply ignore
the farm would actually ``undermine a complex political arrangement that
has been in place in the United States for more than 200 years.''

The fact is, the federal government did have a choice. The owners of the
Santa Cruz farm hardly represented a real threat -- they had worked closely
with local authorities to make sure their enterprise was as legitimate as
circumstances allowed. The decision of the feds to intervene simply
clarified their own priorities.

To frame medicinal marijuana as only a states' rights issue is to ignore
federal flexibility in establishing government priorities. The Bush
administration has made a practice of bashing federal intrusion into local
issues. Its calculated decisions to raid locally sanctioned medicinal
marijuana organizations lay bare both its hypocrisy and its mean-spirited
approach on this matter.

Sure, we have to have laws to ``prevent anarchy,'' as Gerston puts it, but
that concept far predates our Constitution. Gerston would have done better
to go back a couple of decades in his analogy and look not at the founding
of our country but at the tyranny that preceded it.

Rachel L. Sumi
San Jose