Pubdate: Thu, 11 Nov 1999
Date: 11/11/1999
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Author: R.L. Root

*How extremely ironic that the judge who ruled that Peter McWilliams
and Todd McCormick could not use Proposition 215 in their defense
against marijuana charges is named King, George ("Judge Bars Medical
Need, Prop. 215 as Basis for Defense in Marijuana Trial," Nov. 6).

Throughout our state, oppressors persecute sick and dying people for
using a medicine that works.

Medical marijuana is the front line in the war on drugs.

Other battlegrounds include privacy rights, property rights, freedom
of association and right to due process.  The war on drugs is a war on
people.

It has as much to do with drugs as the Boston Tea Party had to do with
tea. And just as King George's oppression of the colonists was
basically economic, the war on drugs continues and grows because it is
a multibillion-dollar industry.  Just as the drug warriors in
Washington do not plan on ever ending their cash-cow drug war, neither
do the drug lords want to see it ended.

R.L. Root,
Westminster