The Great Dope Showdown
Dateline: 5/26/98

From the Notebook: Rare Wisdom Another kid blows a fuse and more students die in school, where they're supposed to be safe. Reporters look around for tearful victims willing to blame objects instead of people, and they find ... Robert Ryker, whose son tackled Kip Kinkel and cut short the murder spree. "It's not a gun problem," Ryker said. "This kid had real problems." Pointing to the intrusive web of existing gun laws, Ryker asked, "What's to stop a kid from breaking any new law?" That's not what the press wanted, of course. Freeze, Mate Don't go getting fresh with the cops downunder; police officers in the Australian state of New South Wales have been granted the authority to stop and search anyone "they suspect of carrying a weapon, demand their identity and order them to move on." Refusal to submit to the frisk carries a fine of A$550. The arbitrary stop power comes, as always, as a result of concern over crime. The random pat-downs are intended to discourage Australians from carrying knives. Premier Carr dismissed civil libertarian critics (and took their names, I'd guess) and called the new police powers "necessary." The cops can also impose a A$220 fine for "obstructing, harassing, intimidating or causing fear." Do you suppose they have themselves in mind? In related news, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation is being granted expanded authority to bug and track Australians and copy computer data. Hmmm.

“I’d trust a jury of Californians more than Federal bureaucrats in Washington,” said Jeffrey Jones, the owner of an Oakland club that distributes marijuana for medical use. His defiance was directed not just at the crusading drug warriors of Washington, D.C., but at Federal District Court Judge Charles Breyer, who’d ordered six of California’s cannabis clubs closed on May 13 in response to a lawsuit initiated by the Department of Justice. By remaining open, the clubs’ proprietors flirt with contempt of court charges, and jury trials on the same. Considering that the California voters who would fill the jury pool overwhelmingly approved Proposition 215, which legalized the medical use of marijuana in California, that’s not a bad horse to back.

The feds don’t recognize the validity of the California proposition, of course. That’s why they’re frantically assaulting every attempt by doctors, growers and distributors to implement the people’s will. Now, it’s true that democratic votes don’t automatically trump the law — if the good people of California had voted to ban criticism of Bill Clinton, for instance, Janet Reno would certainly have been both eager and justified to step in and assert the right of the disgruntled minority to call the president a hideous embarrassment to this country.

But that’s a principle that applies to preserving the liberty guaranteed to us all by the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment, not to stomping it like a weed when citizens choose to scrub from the books a reason or two for throwing their neighbors in the clink. If Californians choose not to expend their limited law enforcement budgets on people who burn the wrong plants, that’s no business of federal lawyers, politicos and seat warmers who prefer the righteous tunnelvision of untreated glaucoma to a clear vista and a yen for snack foods.

In fact, the immorality of depriving people of the right to choose their own medicine aside, there simply is no authorization anywhere in the Constitution for the denizens of foggy bottom to dictate what may or may not be consumed by the residents of any locality in the union. That’s why Prohibition required a particularly poorly reasoned and ill-tempered alteration to the Constitution. And since we’ve repealed that bit of nationwide nastiness, no employee of the parasite on the Potomac has just cause for issuing diktats over what may be eaten, snorted, inhaled or otherwise inserted by the American people into their own bodies.

Even many Californian public officials decline to challenge the legitimacy of Prop. 215. Gov. Pete Wilson, of course, has demonstrated that he is channeling the ghost of Carrie Nation in his attacks on his own constituents. But a coalition of officials, including San Francisco DA Terence Hallinan, support the medical marijuana measure and have called on the state to distribute the stuff if the clubs are closed.

Socialized dope, anyone?

The federal government says that the overwhelming vote of the people of California to give themselves a modicum more breathing room cannot trump federal law. Since there is no basis in the Constitution for the federal narcotics laws over which the DEA and Justice Department drones are so exercised, it’s clear that what the feds really mean is: We’re on a holy crusade, goddamnit, and we have the guns to make it stick.

And so, in the case of California, we have the federal government essentially declaring war on the voters of the state. Holy war. War is not too strong a word, either, since it’s not just legalistic prose and strong words filling the air; federal agents raided a ranch owned by Dennis Peron, who co-authored Prop. 215 and founded the San Francisco cannabis club. The raiders tore up 200 plants, but, in an odd lapse for federal agents, didn’t manage to shoot any children or burn any occupied structures.

The real test of the willingness of the people of California to back their own votes will come in a courtroom, and it’s likely to come soon. The San Francisco cannabis club — the largest in the state — was raided and closed over this past weekend under orders from a San Francisco Superior Court Judge. Clubs in Oakland, Ukiah and Fairfax continue to operate in defiance of Breyer’s order, though, and the Oakland club is reported to have thrown an undercover DEA agent off the premises. Charges and a trial can’t be far down the road. And then Californians will have an opportunity to vote again — to acquit.

So you think I’m full of it, eh? Then go to the primary source:
• California marijuana distribution continues despite judge's order — Nando.net

• Marijuana clubs defy judge's order to close — CNN

• Sheriff evicts San Francisco's Cannabis Healing Center, changes locks — San Francisco Chronicle

• Pot Club Ordered Closed By S.F. Superior Court — San Francisco Chronicle

• U.S. Agents Raid Peron's Pot Farm — San Francisco Chronicle

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