Feds trump California voters

This wasn't supposed to happen here

[Reprinted from Issues & Views October 8, 2001]

The battle is on between the Feds and state governments over just which governing entity will prevail in the regulation of drugs. Although, in 1966, California citizens voted for the legalization of medicinal cannabis, it matters nothing to the leviathan federal government. Here is a report from the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML):

Federal agents raided the offices of the California Medical Research Center in El Dorado County Friday, seizing 32 marijuana plants and thousands of medical records from club members. Club proprietors Dr. Marion Fry and her husband, attorney Dale Schafer, were not arrested in the raid. The bust marks the first time federal agents have targeted a state medical marijuana facility since voters legalized the possession and cultivation of medicinal cannabis in 1996, and comes only weeks after newly-appointed DEA Director Asa Hutchinson announced that any use of marijuana as a medicine "is a violation of federal law ... [and we're] not going to tolerate a violation of the law."

NORML Foundation Legal Director Donna Shea strongly criticized the raid. "In addition to violating the rights of Californians to set their own public health policy, the DEA has seized records that are protected by attorney/client and doctor/patient privilege," she said.

In a similar event, DEA agents recently seized more than 200 plants from a medicinal pot farm outside of Los Angeles, the L.A. Times reported. No arrests were made. The marijuana was destined for patients at the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Cooperative, the paper said.

In a separate case, the director of the Salmon Creek Cannabis Cooperative in Humbolt County is facing federal charges after police seized the club's 200 plants. California NORML Coordinator Dale Gieringer called the decision to prosecute the case federally "highly unusual" since the federal government typically involves itself only in pot cases averaging 1,000 or more plants.

"We can only hope these actions do not represent a new federal initiative to override the will of the voters in California," NORML Director Keith Stroup said.

And in another report from NORML, we learn:

Nearly 98 percent of the marijuana seized under the DEA's "Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program" is feral hemp--a non-psychoactive variety of marijuana, according to figures published in latest edition of the US Bureau of Justice Statistics Sourcebook.

"The government is literally spending tens of millions of dollars to pull up weeds," said Allen St. Pierre, Executive Director of The NORML Foundation. "From a health and safety standpoint, they'd be better off plucking dandelions."

Of the 133.6 million pot plants seized under the program in 1999--the last year for which data is available--more than 130 million were "ditchweed," defined as "wild, scattered marijuana plants [with] no evidence of planting, fertilizing or tending." Feral hemp, which contains only minute traces of THC, grows plentifully throughout the southern and midwestern United States. Many of the plants are remnants from government-subsidized plots grown during World War II.

Six states--Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Dakota--eliminated more than a million hemp plants each. Of these, Missouri seized the largest volume of hemp, a whopping 73.3 million plants. North and South Dakota anti-drug task forces eradicated virtually nothing but hemp. Ironically, a 1999 North Dakota law recognizes industrial hemp as commercial fiber crop and licenses farmers to grow it. However, the state statute offers no protection from federal law prohibiting hemp cultivation.

Learn more about this aspect of the War on Drugs by visiting NORML

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