Pubdate: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 Source: Modesto Bee, The (CA) Copyright: 2002 The Modesto Bee Contact: http://www.modbee.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/271 FEDS GO AFTER MEDICAL POT WHILE REAL PUSHERS GO FREE Some wit once defined a fanatic as a person who redoubles his effort just as he loses sight of his objective. That wit must have been thinking of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and Drug Enforcement Administrator Asa Hutchinson. Their objective is supposed to be to chasing drug traffickers who sell dangerous drugs like methamphetamines and heroin to children. Instead, they are raiding plots that supply medical marijuana to grandmothers with cancer under the terms of California's Proposition 215. The state's growing anger over Ashcroft's fanaticism crystallized this month after DEA agents raided a medical marijuana cooperative in Santa Cruz that operates responsibly with the support of local officials and police. City and state officials, doctors, lawyers and patients are right to be angry. As state Attorney General Bill Lockyer spelled out in a recent letter to Ashcroft and Hutchinson, the raids, conducted without consulting local and state authorities, are doubly outrageous. For one thing, they are unethical abuses of law enforcement power, conducted without any expectation that the targets can or will be successfully prosecuted. Even more important, every hour a federal agent spends on chasing medical marijuana is an hour not available to California's more serious drug problems. Medical marijuana, Lockyer correctly noted, "represents little danger to the public and is certainly not a concern that would warrant diverting scarce federal resources away from the fight against domestic methamphetamine production, heroin distribution or international terrorism." Every time Ashcroft and the DEA go after medical marijuana users, life gets a little easier on traffickers in methamphetamine and heroin. - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens