WAR ON DRUGS THREATENS RIGHTS

The war on drugs keeps getting bigger and meaner.

Just when you think the tide is beginning to turn, someone in charge
takes it a step further.

Last week, DEA agents armed with automatic weapons raided a hospice on
the outskirts of Santa Cruz because it grew and used marijuana for its
patients, most of them terminally ill. The founder and director,
Valerie Corral, who uses marijuana herself to control debilitating
seizures as a result of head trauma following a 1973 car accident, was
taken away in her pajamas. Suzanne Pfeil, a paraplegic patient
suffering from postpolio syndrome, was told to stand up and then was
handcuffed in bed when she could not. All the plants were destroyed.

Of all the medical marijuana clubs, this was the one most true to the
hospice spirit. It was a collective, run on a nonprofit basis. Valerie
and her husband had created a place that brought peace, love and some
measure of freedom from pain to those who came. Like the Brompton
Cocktails found in British hospices, which can contain heroin or
morphine, cocaine, alcohol and other pharmaceutical ingredients, the
medicine was unconventional but effective.

Valerie's hospice was legal under California law, a product of
Proposition 215, the 1996 ballot initiative in which 56 percent of
voters endorsed the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes.
She was and is a member of Attorney General Bill Lockyer's 1999
medical marijuana policy task force. Her hospice was run openly with
cooperation from state and local authorities.

The DEA's raid, and the clear directive from the Bush administration
and its attorney general to assault and close this facility and
others, is a travesty of justice - one that did much to terrorize
American citizens and absolutely nothing to protect or improve their
health, welfare or safety.

More than two-thirds of Americans believe that marijuana should be
legal for medical purposes. Medical marijuana initiatives have won in
all eight states where they have been on the ballot, and would likely
win in all but a handful. The Canadian government is taking steps to
make marijuana available to patients north of our border.

Federal drug policy now lies in the hands of those who might best be
described as the John Birchers of the drug war. Like the Southern
racists who blocked civil rights reforms in the 1950s and 1960s,
today's drug war politicians are out of step with the public, but they
don't care. They're on their own crusade, one in which marijuana is as
sinful as miscegenation was to the Southern racists or homosexuality
is to today's religious fundamentalists.

They're also practitioners of the big lie. "On the face of it," says
John Walters, "the idea that desperately sick people could be helped
by smoking an intoxicating weed seems ... medieval. It is, in fact,
absurd." Never mind thousands of reports by patients and doctors,
dozens of studies and the National Academy of Sciences' conclusion
that marijuana is therapeutically effective for a number of painful,
chronic and terminal medical conditions for which pharmaceutical drugs
are often ineffective or introduce negative side effects.

The hundreds of thousands of Americans who use marijuana for medical
reasons, and the doctors who care for them, deserve a hearing in which
they can defend their use of this unconventional medicine. They
deserve the opportunity to give sworn testimony, and to confront the
sworn testimony of those who persecute them. That's a job for Congress.

The raid on the Santa Cruz medical marijuana facility was, of course,
about more than marijuana. It's part and parcel of the same insanity
that drives the bigger war on drugs - one that now incarcerates more
people for drug law violations in the United States than all of
western Europe (with a much larger population) incarcerates for
everything; one that prefers to sacrifice tens of thousands of lives
and billions of dollars rather than make sterile syringes legally
available to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS.

More than that, it provides insight into the potential abuse of police
power in another war without end on which we have now enbarked. The
attorney general of the United States ordered a raid on a medical
marijuana hospice not because he had to, but because he possessed both
the will and the power to do so. A Congress and a country preoccupied
with many other concerns barely noticed.

Is the Santa Cruz raid, and more generally the war on drugs, a preview
of what lies ahead in the war on terrorism? Is the future one in which
increasingly empowered and emboldened federal police agencies
intimidate, arrest and even terrorize not just those who pose true
threats to security but also those who challenge little more than the
moralistic convictions and political prejudices of power holders in
the nation's capital?

I live for the day when our children will look back on the drug wars
of today the way we now look back on Jim Crow and the Palmer raids
after the First World War, the Japanese-American internment camps of
World War II, and the McCarthyite persecutions of the 1950s. That is
my moral crusade, and one shared by more and more other Americans as
well.