by Vin Suprynowicz
How did we find ourselves living out this dream sequence from some old Cheech and Chong movie?
On Sept. 5, fearless federal drug warriors raided the farm of the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana about 15 miles north of Santa Cruz, Calif., handcuffing the owners and taking chainsaws to 160 plants – the farm's entire fall crop.
Valerie and Michael Corral were arrested on federal charges of intent to distribute marijuana, though it's unlikely they'll ever face trial.
Who were these particular hardened drug lords?
“Suzanne Pfeil understands why federal agents burst in just after dawn with guns drawn and handcuffed her,” wrote John Ritter in his coverage of the raid for USA Today. “That's routine in drug busts. What she can't understand is why agents kept ordering her to stand up after they saw her crutches and leg braces next to the bed.
Then when her blood pressure spiked and she felt chest pains, the agents refused to call an ambulance, Pfeil, 42 and disabled by polio, told the newspaper. “That she can't forgive.”
Wait a minute. What was this sick woman doing hanging out on some drug lord's pot plantation? And why were local police not told about the raid?
Possibly because the Corrals helped write the provision in California's Proposition 215 which allows patients and their caregivers to cultivate their own medicine. It couldn't have taken a lot of detective work to find the place – the farm has been featured in the national media; the Corrals “work with local authorities to grow and distribute their pot to people with doctors' recommendations to use marijuana,” explains Martha Mendoza of the Associated Press.
“Valerie has been very open and very consistent in what she's doing up there and how the marijuana is handled,” local sheriff's spokesman Kim Allyn told USA Today.
Valerie Corral is the movement's ''Mother Teresa,” explains Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, and her group is seen as a model nationally.
Ms. Corral, who suffers seizures from a head injury incurred in a car accident, began smoking marijuana after conventional drugs failed to control her symptoms. “Her disorder is responsive to marijuana and not to other things,” says her doctor, Arnold Leff, who served as deputy director of the White House drug abuse office during the Nixon administration. “This is a very safe herbal product. So if it works, it ought to be used.”
The non-profit WAMM dispenses only marijuana it grows organically. Marijuana is free to its 250 members – like the aforementioned Suzanne Pfeil – who contribute labor to the co-op. About 85 percent of the members are terminally ill cancer and AIDS patients.
“The month of September has seen a dramatic escalation of the War on Drugs in California,” observes Heidi Lypps, director of communications for the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics (www.cognitiveliberty.org).
USA Today now puts the number of recent DEA “medical marijuana” raids at eight, including one in which they hauled away the records of 5,000 medical marijuana users from a doctor's office near Sacramento. (Chalk up doctor-patient confidentiality as yet another casualty of this ever-expanding, always inspiring War on Drugs.)
“The Petaluma and Santa Cruz co-ops were among California's most carefully law-abiding,” Ms. Lypps asserts. “Each required members to have a doctor's prescription, issued ID cards, and worked with local officials to shape agreements and protocols for operation.”
What federal officials are trying to do, of course, is put back into its bottle the genie of California's Proposition 215, which legalized marijuana for medical use on a doctor's recommendation.
We were all taught in high school civics class that “If you don't like the law, the solution is to organize and get the majority of your neighbors to vote to change it.”
Californians have done that. In 1992, 77 percent of Santa Cruz voters approved a measure ending the medical prohibition of marijuana. Four years later, Golden State voters – including 74 percent of those in Santa Cruz – approved Proposition 215, allowing marijuana for medicinal purposes. By 2000, the City Council had approved an ordinance allowing medical marijuana to be grown and used without a prescription.
Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon and Washington state have since followed suit.
It would be tempting to say federal drug warriors have taken leave of their senses, walking into a public-relations nightmare by singling out marijuana being grown specifically for the terminally ill under the supervision and with the approval of local authorities.
But that would imply the drug warriors ever had a firm grip on reality – or a concern for the lives or opinion of decent folk – in the first place.
In fact, these bizarre weed police enforce edicts enacted in the 1930s based on uncorroborated testimony by redneck southern sheriffs that marijuana, cocaine, and opium facilitated the seduction of white women by oversexed Mexicans, Negroes, and Chinamen, while giving these minority Lotharios “the strength of 10.” And the “federal supremacy” they claim to be defending was abrogated and overruled by the 10th Amendment, which specifies that any powers not specifically delegated to the federal government remain with the states.
Does the Constitution grant to the federal government any power to restrict the commerce in any drug or medicine? Of course not. That's why – when the federal government last legitimately (albeit disastrously) attempted a drug prohibition, from 1919 to 1933 – they had to win ratification of a constitutional amendment (since repealed), banning the manufacture and sale of alcohol.
Has Washington City ever sought or obtained a similar constitutional amendment delegating them similar powers to enforce a prohibition on marijuana or cocaine? They have not. Therefore, all such federal statutes have been null and void (under the great precedent of Marbury vs. Madison) from the moment of their inception, and federal drug police are personally liable for the property damage, inconvenience, injuries and death they cause as they now deprive U.S. citizens of their God-given medical liberties under color of law.
''My hope is this bust represents the federal government pushing too far, the overreach that shocks the conscience of a lot more people, especially those in Washington who have seemed so callous to date,'' comments Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance.
Indeed, that “level of outrage” may finally be surfacing.
In a letter to chief federal drug weasel Asa Hutchinson and U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer condemned the bust as a waste of law enforcement resources and a cruel step against a group that presents minimal danger to the public, dubbing such raids “punitive expeditions.”
“It's just absolutely loathsome to me that federal money, energy and staff time would be used to harass people like this,'' echoed Emily Reilly, Santa Cruz's vice mayor.
By Sept. 17, Ms. Mendoza of the AP was gleefully reporting “Cutting ribbons, making declarations, passing out marijuana to sick people, it's all in a day's work if you're the mayor of Santa Cruz.”
DEA spokesman Richard Meyer said he was “appalled” as Mayor Christopher Krohn and his colleagues on the Santa Cruz City Council announced plans to help hand out pot to medical marijuana users at a City Hall rally that day.
“Their goal?” reporter Mendoza asked rhetorically. “Let federal authorities know that in this town, marijuana is considered medicine for those who are ill.”
An unidentified helicopter hovered over City Hall as the big marijuana giveaway and rally was underway – but no federal official dared to actually roll in and bust the mayor.
Although it may be small comfort to the current victims, there's a good chance what we're seeing here is the spastic thrashing of a dying dinosaur's tail.
“Unexpected chinks are appearing in the once seemingly insurmountable legal wall the government has erected against marijuana,” wrote J.D. Tuccille, a senior editor of The Henry Hazlitt Foundation's Free-Market.Net, in the Aug. 22 Las Vegas Review-Journal.
“Not only are Western voters continuing their efforts to ease access to the drug by people with chronic ailments, there are signs that a more laissez-faire attitude may also be extended to recreational users. Even in the halls of power in Washington, D.C., important questions are being asked about the morality and practicality of the federal government's drug prohibition policies.”
What's behind this grass-roots revolt?
“For starters,” Tuccille reasons, “Americans no longer seem to find the drug warriors very convincing. Prohibitionists have tightened laws and massed their forces for years with little discernible effect on the availability or popularity of illegal intoxicants.” While meantime, “Opponents of restrictive laws have been vocal with their message that prohibitionist efforts are far more threatening to health and freedom than are drugs themselves.”
At WAMM's co-op overlooking the Pacific, Mike Corral now walks among the bare rows in the decimated marijuana garden, the stumps of once healthy plants protruding from the dirt, and wonders what will become of the co-op, USA Today reports.
“We'll keep our fingers crossed and hope that sometime between now and March we'll be able to replant.”
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of the books Send in the Waco Killers and The Ballad of Carl Drega. For information on his books or his monthly newsletter, dial 775-348-8591; write 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503; or visit Web site http://www.privacyalert.us.
