Pubdate: Sat, 14 Sep 2002
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 2002 San Jose Mercury News
Contact:  http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/390
Author: Rachel L. Sumi

POT RAID DID NOT HAVE TO HAPPEN

LARRY Gerston's facile assessment of the federal/state tug-of-war over 
medicinal marijuana (Opinion, Sept. 10) was singularly unenlightening.

Gerston asserts that the federal government ``had no choice'' in its recent 
raid on a medicinal marijuana farm in Santa Cruz and that to simply ignore 
the farm would actually ``undermine a complex political arrangement that 
has been in place in the United States for more than 200 years.''

The fact is, the federal government did have a choice. The owners of the 
Santa Cruz farm hardly represented a real threat -- they had worked closely 
with local authorities to make sure their enterprise was as legitimate as 
circumstances allowed. The decision of the feds to intervene simply 
clarified their own priorities.

To frame medicinal marijuana as only a states' rights issue is to ignore 
federal flexibility in establishing government priorities. The Bush 
administration has made a practice of bashing federal intrusion into local 
issues. Its calculated decisions to raid locally sanctioned medicinal 
marijuana organizations lay bare both its hypocrisy and its mean-spirited 
approach on this matter.

Sure, we have to have laws to ``prevent anarchy,'' as Gerston puts it, but 
that concept far predates our Constitution. Gerston would have done better 
to go back a couple of decades in his analogy and look not at the founding 
of our country but at the tyranny that preceded it.

Rachel L. Sumi
San Jose
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