AGENTS RAID CALIF. MEDICAL MARIJUANA CLUB

SAN FRANCISCO - U.S. agents raided a California medical marijuana club and
arrested four people on Tuesday, provoking local protest as the Bush
administration's top drug enforcement official arrived to defend his
get-tough-on-drugs policy.

Demonstrating that federal officials are determined to push prosecution of
marijuana cases despite California's 1996 law legalizing the drug for
certain medical purposes, Drug Enforcement Administration officers searched
clubs and homes in San Francisco and surrounding communities, ordered one
cannabis club shut down and made four arrests.

DEA spokesman Richard Meyer said the crackdown targeted a
marijuana-smuggling operation linking San Francisco area activists.

"It pertains to smuggling and trafficking of marijuana and also some
possible money laundering," Meyer said, adding that the investigation had
been aided by the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Customs Service.

The raids were condemned by San Francisco officials, who have been
outspoken in support of the right of Californians to use marijuana to treat
symptoms of anything from glaucoma to AIDS and cancer.

"This is the federal government trying to make a point in opposition to the
voters of California," San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan
told a crowd of several hundred chanting protesters outside a hall where
DEA Administrator Asa Hutchinson was delivering a speech. "The voters
should be outraged."

Officials and club members said the raid on San Francisco's "Harm Reduction
Center" cannabis club began early on Tuesday morning, and that agents
ordered the building closed while removing hundreds of marijuana plants as
well as computers and other equipment.

The club's director, Richard Watts, was charged along with two associates,
one of whom was arrested in Canada. Another man, James Halloran of Oakland,
was arrested in a separate case and charged with cultivating hundreds of
marijuana plants.

"It's a travesty of American justice," said witness Eric Levy, standing
outside the club's shuttered storefront.

More Raids Should Be Expected

Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman named to the DEA in August,
said California should expect more federal sweeps against
marijuana-distribution clubs.

"The DEA must simply follow the law," Hutchinson said to jeers from an
audience packed with medical marijuana advocates. "We don't make a
judgement of use and abuse. We make a judgement of legal and illegal."

Tuesday's crackdown marked the DEA's latest tough line in California, where
voters in 1996 overwhelmingly approved Proposition 215 as the first law in
the country legalizing medical marijuana use with a doctor's prescription.

That state law was challenged by federal officials. In May, the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled in the case of the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative
that federal anti-drug laws do not permit legal distribution of marijuana
as a "medical necessity" for seriously ill patients.

The raid came on the same day that President Bush unveiled in Washington a
new anti-drug strategy aimed at cutting use of illegal drugs by 10 percent
over two years and 25 percent over five years.

The Supreme Court's ruling against medical marijuana has been widely
ignored in California, where a number of cannabis clubs have continued to
operate with tacit permission from local authorities.

But recently the DEA has taken a tougher line, moving against the Los
Angeles Cannabis Resource Center in October and against the San Francisco
"Harm Reduction Center" on Tuesday.

Hutchinson said Tuesday's raid was not aimed at targeting individual
medical marijuana users but rather "major traffickers" who supply the drug.

He also vowed that federal drug officials would continue to accumulate
information from the scientific community on the potential medical uses of
smoked marijuana, noting that the DEA itself had approved one such study
now underway at the University of California San Diego.