COLORADO BEWARE

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, a beneficent
herb used as medicine for thousands of years without adverse side effects.

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, initially 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