SAN FRANCISCO MAY GROW ITS OWN POT

SAN FRANCISCO - San Francisco city officials are proposing that the city
get into the marijuana growing business - and use the program as
agricultural job training for the unemployed.

Under a measure approved by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Monday,
voters will be asked in November whether the city should look into ways to
begin growing medical marijuana for sick people - in direct defiance of
federal laws banning the drug.

"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 city
Supervisor Mark Leno, who sponsored the measure approved by city leaders
Monday.

Under Leno's proposal, voters will be offered a November ballot measure
which would direct the municipal government to study how to grow and supply
pot for patients who qualify to use it under California's landmark
medicinal marijuana law of 1996.

That law - which led to "medical marijuana clubs" being established across
the state - has been repeatedly challenged in court by federal officials,
who say flatly that marijuana remains illegal.

Many of California's marijuana clubs have shut down voluntarily, while
others have been closed by federal raids. Leno said getting the city
government involved could help to take the pressure off local suppliers.

"I think the federal government and the Bush Administration has bigger fish
to fry right now than continuing to bust local clubs," Leno said.

He said San Francisco has plenty of places where it could grow marijuana,
and could even use the program as agricultural job training for the unemployed.

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

But federal officials cautioned that San Francisco would be picking a
serious legal fight if it sought to turn its vacant lots into pot farms.

"Cultivation, possession and distribution of marijuana is illegal under the
Controlled Substances Act - federal law," Richard Meyer, spokesman for the
DEA's regional office in San Francisco, told the newspaper.

"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," Meyer said. (Compiled from news reports)