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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Terrified that an increasingly pot-tolerant America will spell the end of their moral crusade, the president's anti-drug warriors are making a last stand over marijuana.
Nov 5, 2002 | The new front in the nation's drug war came into sharp focus at 7 a.m. on Sept. 5, when loud shouts and stomping woke Valerie Corral at her home north of Santa Cruz, Calif. Suspecting that the intruders weren't ordinary burglars, she snuck out a back entrance and walked around to her front door to tell them to leave. When she opened the door, stunned federal agents in flak jackets trained M-16s on the 50-year-old homeowner. When she asked to see a search warrant, the officers screamed at her to get down. They pushed her to her knees, then forced her to lie face down on the floor. With her hands handcuffed behind her back, an officer pressed his rifle muzzle to the back of her head.
Valerie Corral tried explaining to the agents (there were about 30) that she and her husband, Michael, 53, ran Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana, a legal cooperative in California that has grown the drug for 250 terminally ill and sick patients, many with cancer or AIDS, for almost nine years. Twenty-two of their clients have died in the past 12 months -- but to the officers from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, that didn't matter. The DEA took Valerie, still in green silk pajamas, and Michael to a federal detention center in San Jose. Under the Federal Controlled Substances Act, marijuana is a Schedule 1 drug -- dangerous and with no possible medicinal value -- right up there with heroin. Not only did they uproot and seize 167 marijuana plants, but they also confiscated the co-op's patient list.
"We do not target drug users," insists Will Glaspy, a DEA spokesman in Washington. "We target drug traffickers. There is no such term as 'medical marijuana,' except as created by the marijuana lobby."
In California and other states -- including three that will feature marijuana initiatives on Tuesday's ballots -- the marijuana lobby happens to be the voters. Valerie, who smokes pot to control grand mal epileptic seizures, worked to legalize medicinal marijuana in Santa Cruz county in 1992. Four years later, she helped draft California's Proposition 215, which lets patients who have a doctor's recommendation grow and use marijuana. So, on Sept. 17, in defiance of President Bush, DEA chief Asa Hutchinson and drug czar John Walters, the Corrals along with Santa Cruz Mayor Christopher Krohn, most of the city council members and a county supervisor handed out pot to patients on the steps of city hall. And under state and local law, it was perfectly legal to do so.
"When you look down the barrel of a gun, it's frightening," Valerie says. "But when you face illness or death, the inhumane actions of the government pale."
In the last year, especially, the Bush administration has renewed the war on marijuana with a vengeance -- only this time, it is a war that pits the federal government against the majority of the American people, and sometimes against state and city officials and even local police officers. Headed by religious conservatives who take an absolutist stance against drugs, the Department of Justice, the DEA and the White House's Office of Drug Policy are using the might of the federal government and millions of dollars worth of advertising in an effort to roll back the public's growing acceptance of marijuana as a medicine and the desire to decriminalize possession of the drug in small amounts. Walters and his allies appear to realize that if they don't stop the acceptance of marijuana now, then the war on drugs as we know it will be forever altered.
The government's drug warriors have already lost ground. Since 1996, eight states have followed California's lead and passed laws allowing cannabis to be used for medicinal purposes with a physician's recommendation: Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. Tuesday, voters in Arizona and Nevada will decide whether to take steps to decriminalize possession of small amounts of the drug. Voters in Ohio will decide whether to allow treatment instead of jail time for some drug users. Even if these ballot initiatives fail, the mere fact that voters are considering them suggests that their ardor for the war on drugs is waning.
The federal government has been trying to outlaw cannabis since the '30s. In 1937, Harry Anslinger, the newly named commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, testified before Congress that "marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death." The American Medical Association opposed passage of the act and recommended that the drug's status as a medicine be maintained. Congress declined to ban marijuana, but in the Marihuana Taxation Act they levied a tax on the crop that had the same practical effect.
Timothy Leary, the psychedelic guru, challenged the act after his marijuana arrests in 1965 and 1966. G. Gordon Liddy, a local district attorney in New York who would later be convicted for his involvement in the Watergate break-in, led the raid on Leary's home in Millbrook, N.Y. In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the act unconstitutional. Not to be deterred, Congress went to work on the Federal Controlled Substances Act in 1970, in which marijuana, heroin and LSD were deemed to be without medical value.
That was the genesis of the modern war on pot -- an effort that has clearly flagged in recent years as the generations that came of age after the 1960s moved into the mainstream. But John Ashcroft, a man whose reputation includes never having touched alcohol or taken a drag on a cigarette, became attorney general in early 2001, promising to "reinvigorate the war on drugs." And he did. Under Hutchinson, a former prosecutor who made a name for himself as the congressman who took the lead in Clinton's impeachment, the DEA is cracking down on state-sanctioned medical marijuana operations, even small ones. So far the DEA has raided or arrested 17 medical marijuana providers in California, 15 of which came after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, plus one in Oregon. A week after medical pot-grower Steve McWilliams publicly handed out buds to show solidarity with the Corrals, the DEA confiscated 26 plants and 10 pounds of the drug he grew for patients in San Diego. Under the Clinton administration, there had been seven raids or arrests since Prop. 215 had passed in 1996, according to the A-Mark Foundation's MarijuanaInfo.org, which compiles information on medical marijuana.
"Attorney General Ashcroft is not stupid; he understands that if society changes its mind on medical marijuana, then it sets the table for a completely different discussion about marijuana and changes the debate about drug prohibition," says Jamin Raskin, a constitutional law professor at American University in Washington, and the author of "Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court vs. The People," slated for publication in March. "This is the Battle of Bull Run in the war on drugs. If the critics of drug prohibition win on medical marijuana, the cards begin to topple in a more libertarian direction."
