WHO WILL PROTECT US WHEN ASHCROFT KNOCKS?

While local editorialists have generally noted with concern the
recent assault on Oregon's benevolent assisted-suicide policy by our
ever-earnest Attorney General John Ashcroft, I have heard little
comment on his even more sweeping efforts to roll back California's
citizen-initiated medical marijuana program.

For five years now, Californians suffering from a variety of medical
conditions have been entitled to legally prescribed cannabis.

Attorney General Ashcroft is evidently quite upset by this state of
affairs and has lately sent in armed drug agents to shut down the
state's authorized cannabis centers, seizing nearly 1,000
confidential medical records in draconian raids. Doctors and sick
patients have been terrorized by Ashcroft's threat to arrest and
imprison them under widely discredited federal prohibition laws,
intially passed in 1937 over the vocal objections of the American
Medical Association.

It is an outrage that Congress refuses to revise federal law to
prevent this abuse of prosecutorial power. Colorado voters, patients
and caregivers must wonder just who will protect their medical rights
should Ashcroft turn his guns on our own state's recently enacted
medical cannabis program. Our elected officials' scandalous silence
on this question leaves little hope for humane reforms.

Cord MacGuire Boulder