Revolutionary Worker #920, Aug. 17, 1997
In November 1996, medical marijuana initiatives passed in Arizona and California supposedly legalized the use of marijuana for medical purposes. Controversy over passage of these laws brought to light the widespread use of marijuana to treat AIDS and cancer as well as other diseases. Many people hoped that the laws would allow folks suffering from serious and life-threatening illnesses to use marijuana without fear of arrest and harassment and enable doctors to openly prescribe marijuana for their patients. But the system has other plans and priorities. For the U.S. power structure, the so-called "war on drugs" is more important than people's lives.
In Arizona, the medical marijuana proposition has been effectively overturned by actions of the state legislature. And in California a two-sided battle is underway over the Compassionate Use Act of 1996 (Proposition 215). For millions of seriously ill people, their doctors, and their families, the fight for medical marijuana is a life-and-death proposition. And the fight is on.
Few people in the medical marijuana movement were surprised that President Clinton opposed the medical marijuana initiative--viewing administration opposition as part of the necessary, if cynical, political maneuvers by Clinton to win the election. But those who held out hope that once Clinton was elected the administration would take a low-key approach to the initiative were in for a shock.
As soon as California's Proposition 215 and Arizona's Proposition 200 passed, Clinton's Drug Czar (former General) Barry McCaffrey mobilized an army of federal law enforcement and regulatory agencies. The Department of Justice (including the FBI), the Department of Health and Human Services, the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), the Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Labor, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were all unleashed to stomp down on any attempt to grow, distribute, prescribe or use marijuana for medical purposes. (Compare this massive mobilization of the federal police and bureaucracies to suppress these initiatives with Clinton's non-challenge to the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209.)
Residents of public housing projects have been notified that the "one strike and you're out" policy remains in effect, medical marijuana laws or not. Employees of the federal government have been told "zero tolerance" rules will be enforced. The IRS was directed to disallow tax deductions for medical marijuana use. The DEA was sent off to snoop on "private mail, parcel and freight services to ensure continuing compliance with internal company policies" against distributing marijuana, and those companies were told that "federal investigations and prosecutions will be instituted" if they transport medical marijuana.
Unable to pose a direct constitutional challenge to the law, the Clinton administration went after the doctors. On December 30, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, Attorney General Janet Reno, Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala and a DEA official threatened California doctors that recommending or prescribing marijuana "will lead to administrative action by the Drug Enforcement Administration to revoke the practitioner's registration." Doctors were also told that the Department of Health and Human Services would exclude them from participating in Medicare or Medicaid. Taking away a doctor's ability to write prescriptions or treat Medicare or Medicaid patients is like taking away his or her license to practice medicine.
In January a family physician near Sacramento got an early morning visit from two DEA agents who showed him a copy of a letter he'd written recommending a patient use medical marijuana after the passage of Prop 215. They asked to see his DEA registration number, and tried to interrogate him--he refused.
In February of this year, a dozen California physicians filed a class action suit against the federal government, and in April a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction barring the government from taking action against doctors who prescribe marijuana. This temporary injunction is being challenged by the federal government. The newsletter of the University of California, San Francisco Medical School reported that doctors consider the situation "hazy" and that "physicians fear they could face legal battles or lose their livelihoods by recommending marijuana." Some doctors feel they had more freedom to recommend marijuana to patients before the law was passed.
While state authorities are, in the main, technically respecting the right of medical marijuana clubs in California to sell marijuana to patients with medical prescriptions, in reality they are imposing "Catch-22" rules that make it almost impossible for most of these distributors to legally serve their patients.
While the law allows patients and care-givers to grow marijuana for medical use, there is no provision in the law for transporting marijuana from growers to patients. Both state and federal law enforcement agencies have policies to bust people who transport any amount of marijuana. This makes it really difficult for the clubs to obtain supplies.
Only days after the federal judge issued the injunction against the federal ban on doctors prescribing marijuana, Flower Therapy, a new cannabis buyers' club in San Francisco that operates with the approval of the city's District Attorney and Department of Public Health, was raided by DEA agents who kicked down the doors and confiscated over 300 marijuana plants and growing equipment. Cultivating over 100 plants carries a mandatory minimum five-year federal prison sentence.
So far the U.S. attorney has not brought charges in the Flower Therapy bust--two of the proprietors are AIDS patients and the feds would be unlikely to win the case in front of a California jury. But the raid sent a message to others.
In late July, the administrators of the only medical marijuana club in San Jose, California threatened to go on a hunger strike, as well as suspend their own treatment for AIDS and cancer, unless the city backs off on enforcing a rule that the club must grow all its marijuana on its own premises.
An informative article by Michael Pollan in the New York Times Magazine, July 20, 1997, told how the San Jose cop in charge of the medical marijuana beat had visited the Santa Clara County Medical Center to discuss the laws which forbid transporting marijuana. The center had been buying their marijuana from Dennis Peron, the controversial pioneer of the medical marijuana movement and director of the San Francisco Buyer's Club. But the sergeant pointed out that this would be considered a felony. When the center protested that they did not have space to grow their own marijuana, the police sergeant offered to hook them up with some NASA engineers who would help them develop a "state of the art" hydroponic system to grow marijuana in their space. One of the center's directors pointed out the obvious contradictions: "You're telling me I have to grow marijuana on site, when the DEA is raiding clubs for doing exactly that. Flower Therapy had 331 plants chopped up--I can't afford to lose all my medicine like that." The sergeant was unmoved.
The Santa Clara center--like other clubs which are trying to take the route of working within the law--is already complying with a list of draconian rules including that each patient's name, current photograph, current home telephone number and current residential address be available for the police to inspect at any time without a warrant! These rules subject patients with serious illness to stressful and invasive police-state procedures--while also violating their medical privacy.
Others have a more combative outlook toward the situation. Dennis Peron told the New York Times: "Some people are trying to forget that, even with 215, dispensing medical marijuana is still an act of civil disobedience. Isn't that the message of Flower Therapy?"
As for people growing medical marijuana, there has been little let-up in the annual assaults on them by the state and federal governments' war on drugs. Helicopters from CAMP--the Campaign Against Marijuana Production--routinely fly at rooftop or treetop level over farms and homes in Santa Cruz, Del Norte, Humboldt Lake, Mendocino, Monterey, Placer, San Bernadino, Shasta, Siskiyou, Sonoma and Trinity counties in California.
The San Francisco Examiner quoted a resident of Santa Cruz County just south of San Francisco, saying, "There is an attitude that we are all criminals because we live in the country--this entire surveillance violates our constitutional rights. Their goal is to get rid of marijuana no matter whose rights might get trampled." Residents of these counties are protesting helicopters hovering over their homes videotaping them, raids and arrests. In Santa Cruz county, as in California agriculture overall, the main cash crop is marijuana. A spokesperson for the Santa Cruz Hemp Council told the SF Examiner, "We are not going away until they go away."
A few local authorities have adopted a supportive policy toward medical growers. Valerie Corral (who suffers from epilepsy) is a medical marijuana patient, grower and founder of the non-profit Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana or WAMM. Even before the passage of 215 the city of Santa Cruz refused to prosecute her when her garden was raided twice. And the Mayor of Santa Cruz honored her with a proclamation in appreciation of her work growing marijuana and giving it away to poor patients. Corral was instrumental in persuading drafters of the law to include a provision that patients can grow their own marijuana--in part to ensure that the plants are grown organically and that the quality of the medicine is pure. She offers WAMM members free seedlings to grow their own.
But Corral's experience is unusual. Even after the passage of Proposition 215, authorities in California continue to barge into people's homes and arrest them for possession of marijuana and marijuana plants. The Los Angeles area home of prominent marijuana researcher and activist Todd McCormick--which doubles as a medical marijuana research center--was raided by federal DEA agents as well as L.A. County Sheriffs. McCormick is presently out on $500,000 bail posted by actor and activist Woody Harrelson. One friend of Todd's said that "All someone had to say was that they were sick--or knew someone who was sick--and Todd opened right up."
A Black activist who lives in South Central Los Angeles told the RW that police barged into her home and busted her for having marijuana plants that she used to treat her sickle cell anemia. Police had entered her yard supposedly in pursuit of a man accused of stealing a bottle of wine. After word was put out broadly in the medical marijuana community, charges against her were dropped. Another sickle cell anemia victim was arrested in Orange County in January of this year, and state prosecutors turned her case over to federal authorities even though she had what prosecutors called "a letter from a doctor that said he believed marijuana might do her some good." The prosecutor was quoted as saying, "We're not saying it's legal for her to possess marijuana."
The current situation is that some northern California police departments will allow patients to possess small amounts of marijuana if they carry authorization from a registered Buyers' Club. But in Southern California police often arrest patients and require them to prove in court that they are legally using marijuana for medical treatment.
All this is taking place in a state where the medical use of marijuana is supposedly legal, and against doctors, marijuana providers and patients who are attempting to use medical marijuana in compliance with the rules set by the authorities.
The situation across the country is much more severe and repressive. An article in the Atlantic Monthly that appeared in September 1994 compiled a list of people sentenced to decades in jail for possession of, sale of, or buying marijuana. In Oklahoma a man named Will Foster is serving a 93-year prison sentence for growing marijuana to treat a chronic pain condition. According to an account distributed by the Drug Reform Coordination Network, Foster was growing marijuana in a 5' x 5' room in his house. In the state of Nevada, possession of any amount of marijuana is a felony. In Montana you can get life in prison for selling a pound of marijuana, once. In Indiana you can go to jail for two years, get fined $10,000, have a felony record, lose your driver's license and have your car taken by the authorities for having any marijuana on you while driving. In Oklahoma a man named Larry Jackson was convicted of having .16 gram of marijuana (less than a hundredth of an ounce) and was sentenced to life in prison. In 1990 a man with three young children was convicted of buying marijuana from local sheriffs in Alabama in a "reverse sting" operation and sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.
There is overwhelming evidence that marijuana is helpful for patients with many severe illnesses--including people suffering from cancer, AIDS, glaucoma, sickle cell, epilepsy, paraplegia, multiple sclerosis, insomnia, post-traumatic stress disorder, anorexia, anxiety, psoriasis, and even drug addiction. In 1988, following DEA hearings to change the status of marijuana so that doctors could legally prescribe it, a federal DEA law judge Francis Young wrote in his decision that "marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man." His decision was overruled by the DEA. And the government continues to deny the people legal access to this medicine and has even prevented doctors from conducting studies using the drug. A recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine said that "a federal policy that prohibits physicians from alleviating suffering by prescribing marijuana for seriously ill patients is misguided, heavy-handed and inhumane."
Indeed the cruel and stubborn policies of the government point once again to the madness they call the "war on drugs" and the brutal priorities of the justice system. The Clinton administration has tried to defend its policies by claiming concern about teen-age pot smokers, medical standards for testing and so on, but at the end of the day, the federal authorities are really concerned that if marijuana is legalized for medical use it will undercut their ability to continue the massive punishing program of the "war on drugs."
While the public relations hype for law enforcement officials emphasizes cocaine and crack busts, in reality the criminalization of marijuana is at the heart of the government's "war on drugs," where $16 billion a year is spent to kick down doors, criminalize whole communities and lock up a generation of youth. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) has reported that over the last 30 years, there have been almost 11 million marijuana arrests in the U.S. and today, someone is arrested for violating marijuana laws every 54 seconds--85 percent of those arrests are for possession. And NORML reports that since they started publicizing these numbers, they know of only one time that this information has been reported in the mainstream press.
In 1982 when Ronald Reagan declared the "war on drugs," the only drug he mentioned by name was marijuana--a not-too-subtle attack on the whole counterculture of the generations since the 1960s. And in the years since his speech the government has focused most of its drug wars on marijuana. The Bush administration witnessed a major escalation in arrests and penalties. And in 1995, 600,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana crimes--an all-time record. The greatest number of drug arrests are for marijuana. Marijuana is the main focus of intrusive drug tests in the workplace and the unscientific jargon that passes for education on drugs in the schools. And marijuana busts account for the bulk of the property--including cars and homes--confiscated in drug busts by police departments across the country--who have come to rely on such "asset forfeitures" to fund their operations.
Michael Pollan observed: "Indeed, it may not be possible to have a drug war on the scale we now do without illicit marijuana. Remove the millions of marijuana users from the ranks of illicit drug users and we would be left with a `drug abuse epidemic' involving roughly two million regular heroin and cocaine users--a public health problem, to be sure, but hardly one big enough to justify spending $16 billion a year."
But who can look at this "war" that throws thousands of people in jail while banning a potentially life-saving drug and see anything but a "war on the people"?
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