SAN FRANCISCO SEEKS A POT PLOT

City Aims To Grow Drug For Medicinal Purposes

SAN FRANCISCO -( REUTERS)- San Francisco officials want their city to go to
pot -- literally.

City leaders are proposing that the city get into the marijuana growing
business -- and use the program as agricultural job training for unemployed
people.

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

Under Leno's proposal, voters will be offered a ballot measure that 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 so-called medical marijuana clubs being established
across the state -- has been repeatedly challenged in court by federal
officials, who say 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 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
Drug Enforcement Administration'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.