Stamping out state law

This wasn't supposed to happen here

[Reprinted from Issues & Views October 7, 2002]

As Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance, says in his San Diego Tribune article (9/19/02), the drug warriors are growing meaner. Just when you think that the tide is beginning to turn, they just get nastier.

Nadelmann reports on a hospice raid by DEA agents that took place last month on the outskirts of Santa Cruz, California. Armed with automatic weapons, the agents stormed the hospice because the director grew and used marijuana for her patients (legal under California law), most of whom are terminally ill. The director, Valerie Corral, was taken away in her pajamas, while a paraplegic patient was ordered to stand, and handcuffed to her bed when she could not.

It is sad, indeed, to learn of yet another case where the federal government makes a mockery of the Constitution, as it stamps on laws desired by citizens of a state and passed by its legislature. Nadelmann writes:

The raid on the Santa Cruz medical marijuana facility was, of course, about more than marijuana. It's part and parcel of the same insanity that drives the bigger war on drugs--one that now incarcerates more people for drug law violations in the United States than all of western Europe (with a much larger population) incarcerates for everything. . . .

More than that, it provides insight into the potential abuse of police power in another war without end on which we have now embarked. The attorney general of the United States ordered a raid on a medical marijuana hospice not because he had to, but because he possessed both the will and the power to do so. A Congress and a country preoccupied with many other concerns barely noticed.

Is the Santa Cruz raid, and more generally the war on drugs, a preview of what lies ahead in the war on terrorism? Is the future one in which increasingly empowered and emboldened federal police agencies intimidate, arrest and even terrorize not just those who pose true threats to security but also those who challenge little more than the moralistic convictions and political prejudices of power holders in the nation's capital?

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