When my kids were little, an older and more experienced mother told me that one key to raising kids safely is to limit the number of "nos" to what really matters and insist firmly on those. Motorcycles and heroin, she said, which seems like a pretty good list. I added driving drunk or getting in a car with someone who had been drinking. I left heroin on the list, even though heroin use is totally foreign to me. I have friends and family who have struggled with alcohol (mostly) and other drugs, but heroin is outside of my life experience.

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LOS ANGELES — The real drug question that George W. Bush needs to answer in this campaign is not whether he used cocaine 25 years ago, but whether he will end the hypocrisy and posturing that have have replaced common sense in debating drug policy in this country.

If the Texas governor, like millions of Americans, experimented with drugs in his youth and has now grown up to be a responsible citizen who might be president of the United States, then that might suggest to some that the mere use of illegal drugs does not set one on an irreversible life of crime. But federal and state law operate on exactly the opposite assumption, not because criminologists support it, but because politicians are afraid to oppose it.

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The Drug Enforcement Agency made a mistake this week, which may have a major impact on its fight against medicinal marijuana. At 6 o'clock Monday morning, federal agents entered the offices of Flower Therapy in San Francisco's Mission district, seizing 331 marijuana plants, growing equipment and financial records. It was the first federal raid of a facility established in the wake of Proposition 215, the California initiative enacted last fall that makes it legal under state law to use marijuana for medicinal purposes. From the point of view of those who have opposed Proposition 215 as a Trojan horse for drug legalization, they could not have picked a worse test case. The official administration position on Proposition 215 has been that the voters were duped into supporting medicinal marijuana because we were too stupid, sympathetic or shortsighted to understand that what we were really voting for was drug legalization. Drug czar Barry McCaffrey, joined by leading conservatives such as William Bennett, campaigned against 215, denounced its passage, and pledged to ignore it. In each case, he warned that the issue was not really AIDS and cancer patients but access to all drugs by the broader population, our children included. But the issue at Flower Therapy really is AIDS and cancer patients. According to its spokesman, Gary Johnson, himself an AIDS patient with a prescription for marijuana, Flower Therapy worked with the San Francisco Police Department as well as the Health Department in structuring its operations. It did not open its doors until after Proposition 215 was passed, and it screens every client to ensure that they are legitimate patients seeking marijuana for medicinal use. Flower Therapy has a business license and a milliondollar insurance policy Johnson told reporters, evidencing its determination "to run a medicinal marijuana operation that was above reproach." Flower Therapy made no secret of what it was doing. The impetus for Monday's raid was a television report with "great visuals (that) showed the whole operation," DEA spokesman Stan Varga told reporters. "We were really interested in the visuals...a largescale, hydroponic marijuana cultivation." Federal law draws no distinctions between medicinal and other users, or between businesses such as Flower Therapy and drug dealers who hang out in malls. And no state has the right to create defenses to federal law. Under federal law, the DEA plainly had a legal right to raid the offices of Flower Therapy, and federal prosecutors could clearly seek indictments of its owners and operators, although finding a jury willing to convict might be more difficult. But the real question is not whether federal authorities have a right to ignore Propositions 215, but whether they have enough respect for the will of the people and principles of federalism to let Californians try to make it work. At least since Willie Horton, few Democrats have been willing to risk any position that might be caricatured as "soft on crime." And conservatives, with very few exceptions, seem to have no difficulty renouncing first principles of limited government and federalism not to mention individual liberty when the challenge is framed as being tough on drugs. Yet if ever there were an area where these conservative principles should be applied it is to the question of marijuana, particularly medicinal marijuana. The result of treating every crime and drug issue, even medicinal marijuana, as a test of toughness is bipartisan paralysis that only the people can address. There is obviously a legitimate concern that the legalization of medicinal marijuana could increase teenage access or lead to broader abuse of other drugs. But the federal government which has spent the last three decades waging a "war" against drugs that has cost billions and failed miserably by every measurable standard plainly has no monopoly on good answers to drug abuse. Why not allow states the freedom to act as Justice Brandeis' "laboratories for experimentation" in testing out different approaches to the prohibition of drugs? We couldn't do any worse.

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