POT PROP CATCHES ON WITH SF VOTERS

SAN FRANCISCO (UPI) -- San Franciscans will vote this November on a
proposal to have the city grow medical marijuana for distribution to the
sick and stoned, and it appeared Tuesday that the measure would win by a
landslide.

An unscientific poll by SFGate.com indicated that the proposal that was
placed on the November 5 ballot by the San Francisco County Supervisors
late Monday would pass by a wide margin in the city that was the birthplace
of the counter-culture in the 1960s.

The poll, which was being conducted on the SFGate.com Web site, found
78-percent of those who voted favored the proposal despite its apparent
clash with federal law. Only 14-percent opposed while 8 percent clicked the
option chiding the supervisors for even coming up with the idea.

Although the measure will likely be the fodder for comedy monologues and
talk-show outrage through the summer, the supervisor who proposed it saw
the issue as a serious one in which the supposed health benefits of the
drug were being denied to patients even though California voters had
approved its use.

"If the federal government insists on standing in our way locally, we must
take matters into our own hands and protect the lives of our community
members and protect their right to access life-saving medicine," said
Supervisor Mark Leno, who is also a Democratic nominee for the state Assembly.

Advocates for medical marijuana call the plant a vital means of fighting
off the nausea caused by AIDS and chemotherapy, which allows patients to
stomach the rigorous treatments that keep them alive.

A statewide measure passed by the voters in 1996 authorized doctors to
prescribe marijuana, but did not contain any provisions on how patients
should obtain it. Marijuana is illegal under federal law, and narcotics
agents have closed down so-called buyers clubs across the nation.

Critics of the crackdown say many patients are reluctant to seek marijuana
on the street because they are too sick or fear being arrested or mugged.

As a result, Leno proposed a measure to encourage the city to look into
cultivating marijuana on vacant lots and other city lands that would be
distributed to individuals whose doctors prescribed the weed for them.

"We have a lot of land," Leno told the San Francisco Chronicle. "That's not
going to be a problem."

Although the measure does not require city government to actually start
raising the plants, the Drug Enforcement Administration took a dim view of
the idea.

"Unless Congress changes the law and makes marijuana a legal substance,
then we have to do our job and enforce the law, whether or not it's
popular," DEA spokesman Richard Meyer said.