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 - --- MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart