FWD:L.A. Times article about Medical Marijuana

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From: byrd45 (Original Message) Sent: 4/30/2005 1:53 PM
Be sure to write the Times thanking them for their coverage with this
piece:

letters@latimes.com

DEA On Wrong Trail
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-pot29apr29,0,3397548.story

When San Francisco's Board of Supervisors met Monday to discuss how
to tighten oversight of the city's 43 medical marijuana dispensaries,
Bush administration officials cheered, for all the wrong reasons.

Drug Enforcement Administration agents should have been thrilled that
the city is trying to fill the regulatory gulf created in 1996 when
Californians passed Proposition 215, vaguely sanctioning marijuana
for "any . illness for which marijuana provides relief." The DEA
should be offering to help cities draw a sharper line around
legitimate medical use.

But no. DEA agents hailed the effort because, they said, it would
give them a paper trail to bust more patients and doctors.

The agents' attitude captures the administration's pot policy: Rather
than focusing on curbing harmful drug abuse, it's mounting arbitrary
and vindictive assaults on both states' rights and patient care. In
the next month, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on whether the
Justice Department has the right to prosecute patients and doctors
who use medical marijuana in California and elsewhere.

The betting is that the court will side with the administration. Pot
became a federal crime three decades ago, when Congress declared that
marijuana has no accepted medical use and put it in the same class as
heroin - illustrating how far the law can stray from common sense.

Since then, specific medical benefits, such as dimming pain and
helping AIDS and cancer patients combat nausea, have been thoroughly
established.

The administration's prosecutions have punished even those using
marijuana for purposes that no medical authority would dismiss as
recreational. For example, Angel Raich, an Oakland mother of two,
used the drug as a last resort to ease the constant pain of a brain
tumor. And Diane Monson of Oroville used cannabis to help her stay
mobile despite a degenerative spinal disease.

Local officials are trying to kill obviously bad ideas - like the
medical marijuana buyers club that opened last month in a San
Francisco welfare hotel housing substance abusers. Instead, the drug
agents' threat last week to continue their random prosecutions is
likely to derail laudable efforts to regulate Proposition 215.
-end-


Again, be sure to write the Editor:
letters@latimes.com