US CA: OPED: Our War on Drugs Does More Harm Than Good
Pubdate: Thu, 06 Mar 2003
Source: Oakland Tribune, The (CA)
Copyright: 2003 MediaNews Group, Inc. and ANG Newspapers
Contact: triblet@angnewspapers.com
Website: http://www.oaklandtribune.com/
Author: John Wagers
Note: John Wagers is a member of the Drug Policy Alliance and the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. He lives in Oakland.
OUR WAR ON DRUGS DOES MORE HARM THAN GOOD
THE problems resulting from the enforcement of our punitive drug laws are becoming more unbearable every day. My concern is the effect drug laws are having on the quality of life in California, my city and my neighborhood. I am an 84-year-old chemist and I am not an illicit drug user.
Crime and violence plague our cities. Civil rights of citizens are violated. Prisons are exploding and lives wasted. Meanwhile, the ever-increasing cost of the drug war robs funds sorely needed for useful programs. This is one budget item where growth is assured because powerful interests benefit.
The politics of the Democratic Party is nearly as bad as the Republican Party on this issue -- a politics of oppression.
I still remember my early days in Nebraska when alcohol was prohibited. The Chicago scene of crime and terror was on the front page of the daily. Today, we prohibit cannabis (marijuana) a benign drug, safer than tobacco or alcohol and not conducive to dependence. Many people use it for its therapeutic value and/or mild psychoactive effect.
Marijuana was improperly classified by federal law along with hard drugs in Schedule 1 for political reasons alone. It's time to reclassify it in the same schedule as anti-depressants. Why are we not free to smoke pot, or grow cannabis or hemp for its industrial fiber?
Our federal government tried and convicted Ed Rosenthal recently for growing marijuana to help sick people tormented with pain. Bryan Epis of Chico was sentenced to 10 years in prison for doing the same, though medical use of marijuana is allowed by California law. This injustice and oppression is an outrageous violation of our personal freedom.
Police and criminal justice resources should be focused on serious crimes.
Canada, Britain, Switzerland and several other European countries have legalized marijuana or are about to do so. The avoided costs of enforcement and the revenue gained in regulation can help improve their financial welfare.
The State's Right to Marijuana Act by Rep. Barney Frank would authorize states to regulate marijuana free from federal interference. It would also allow prescription sale of marijuana through pharmacies as a Schedule 2 controlled substance.
We know that much of the violent crime in Oakland is related to the drug trade. This trade and violence will continue as long as it is profitable.
Marijuana is the volume leader on the illicit drug market. According to author and journalist Dan Baum, without prohibition of marijuana, the country's drug problem would be minuscule. There are fewer than a million hard-core users of heroin and cocaine nationally. More than 70 million Americans smoke pot.
We need a common-sense drug policy that includes legalization and regulation of marijuana with provision for harm reduction education and treatment to prevent misuse of all drugs. This makes more sense than more violence, more cops, more prisons and longer sentences. The drug war is doing more harm than drug abuse itself.
It's time to join the new anti-war movement!
Please scroll down for more about the damages from the War On (some) Drugs
FEDERAL WAR ON MARIJUANA IS MISGUIDED
Common sense will tell you that something went terribly wrong in the courtroom of federal Judge Charles R. Breyer.
Justice wasn't blind. It was blindsided. Late last month a federal jury in San Francisco found Ed Rosenthal of Oakland guilty of marijuana cultivation and conspiracy. He faces a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison.
Reaction was swift.
"Kangaroo court." "Railroaded." "He didn't deserve this." "He's not a criminal."
And that's the jury who convicted him talking.
You see, no one told the jury that Rosenthal was working for the city of Oakland's medicinal marijuana program when he was arrested. Breyer would not allow it.
A single "not guilty" vote would have resulted in a hung jury.
Once some members of the jury learned the truth, they became angry.
Five of them, in an unusual, courageous move, showed up Tuesday in front of the courthouse to denounce the trial and their decision, and apologize to Rosenthal.
"It was like a kangaroo court," juror Marney Craig told reporters.
"I really feel manipulated in a way," said another juror, Pam Klarkowsky. "I feel the jury was railroaded into making this decision."
"I feel like I made the biggest mistake in my life," Craig said. "We convicted a man who is not a criminal."
Unfortunately, I don't think this is an isolated instance.
For many months now, the federal judicial system has been spinning out of control. People have been arrested and kept incommunicado. There have been secret hearings closed to the scrutiny of the press and the public. Whistle-blowers who have revealed federal wrongdoing have been punished. Big Brother is watching what you say, do and even what books you check out of the library.
In the name of security and law and order, the feds are slowly chipping away at our liberty, slowly squeezing us into conformity.
Rosenthal's case came about because although growing medicinal pot is legal in California, it is illegal under U.S. law.
Watching from afar, the New York Times called the federal attack on people like Rosenthal a "misguided marijuana war."
"The Bush administration's war on medical marijuana is not only misguided but mean-spirited," the Times said in an editorial this week. "Doctors have long recognized marijuana's value in reducing pain and aiding in the treatment of cancer and AIDS, among other diseases."
And, the Times pointed out, a recent poll found 80 percent of Americans support legalized medicinal marijuana.
The Times alluded to one of the characteristics I've spotted in our federal government: In the eyes of many, our federal government has become a bully.
It is even picking on Us the People, trying to thwart the will of California voters.
In 1996, Californians approved Proposition 215, the medicinal marijuana initiative that made what Rosenthal did legal.
"If the Bush administration really believes Proposition 215 has no legal authority, it should seek to strike down the law itself," said the Times. "Or it could go after cities like Oakland, which make medical marijuana available as part of municipal policy. Such an approach could be inconvenient for an administration that favors greater autonomy for state and local governments. But it is less vindictive than a strategy that attacks doctors and people like Mr. Rosenthal."
In other words, Mr. Bully, stop picking on the little guys.
Meanwhile, other cases are pending against medicinal marijuana growers.
I find it strange that, given the state of the country and the world, federal law enforcement people seem to have a lot of time on their hands.
Now that's scary.
POT CASE FUELS JURY POWER DEBATE
Jurors who convicted Oakland medical marijuana grower Ed Rosenthal keep saying they now wish they had not done so, something they said most recently to a national television audience Friday.
They know Rosenthal grew marijuana and they know federal law plainly forbids that. But the jurors say if they'd known more about the medical purpose for which Rosenthal acted, they would have "nullified" -- refused to find him guilty, knowing he broke a law but believing the law itself is unjust or misapplied.
Now Rosenthal's case has re-ignited debate over whether jury nullification is anarchy or a basic, unwritten civil right.
"Juries clearly have the power to nullify, but it's also perfectly clear that's not what we want them to do," said Professor J. Clark Kelso, at the University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento. "You don't want to be telling jurors that, 'Oh, by the way, you don't have to follow the law.'"
That's exactly what jurors should know, said Iloilo Marguerite Jones, the executive director of the Fully Informed Jury Association, a Montana-based nonprofit organization that champions juries' power to weigh not only evidence but also a law's merit and use.
"The court of public opinion is distilled and refined into its essence in the creation of a jury, and in their deliberations. ... They reflect the conscience of the community and the highest and best use of our justice system," she said.
Jury nullification advocates like Jones note some founding fathers thought likewise.
John Adams in 1771 said, "It is not only the juror's right, but his duty to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment and conscience, though in direct opposition to the instruction of the court." Thomas Jefferson in 1789 said, "I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."
And Alexander Hamilton in 1804 said, "Jurors should acquit, even against the judge's instruction ... if exercising their judgment with discretion and honesty they have a clear conviction the charge of the court is wrong."
But critics say our judicial system has evolved since then, situating jurors as triers of fact -- deciding what actually happened -- and leaving the law's application and interpretation to judges.
It's both a means of ensuring equal protection under law and "a due-process concern," Kelso said. "I have a right to be judged according to the law I know. You can't have criminal laws made up after the fact and applied retroactively.
"The only way that works is if the judge instructs the jury on the applicable law," he said, with jurors "applying the law to the facts they find."
Kelso said citizens have their say by electing and lobbying representatives who make laws. If people think a law -- in Rosenthal's case, the federal marijuana law -- is unjust, "the solution is not to undermine the jury system, the solution is to try to change federal law.
"There is no right of nullification," he said. "They have a power solely as a consequence of the fact that normally we don't invade the jury's deliberative process."
The California Supreme Court issued a pair of simultaneous, unanimous rulings in 2001 saying just that.
"A nullifying jury is essentially a lawless jury," Chief Judge Ronald George wrote. "Jury nullification is contrary to our ideal of equal justice for all and permits both the prosecution's case and the defendant's case to depend upon the whims of a particular jury."
But the court also strictly limited what can be done about it, leaving judges the power to intervene only when jurors flatly refuse to deliberate or to follow instructions -- a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" situation.
Jones insists nullification doesn't violate equal protection, and said relying on elected lawmakers isn't enough.
"Our legislatures... come together and enact laws often unaware of how those laws may be applied or accepted in their communities or by the country," she said, citing as an example the 1920s prohibition of alcohol. "It is the jury that is the final test of the validity of those laws in their application to the citizens."
Sometimes nullification spurs legislative change, she said, noting New England juries refused to convict under 1850's federal Fugitive Slave Act requiring escaped slaves to be returned to Southern owners. Actually, that act wasn't repealed until 1864, after some states passed laws conflicting with it -- much as California's and seven other states' laws conflict with federal marijuana law -- and years after the Civil War had erupted.
Letting juries decide a law's merit means depending on the values of any dozen citizens, which might require a very positive view of human nature. For example, when all-white Southern juries acquitted their peers of heinous, racist crimes against African-Americans and civil rights activists despite clear evidence, that was jury nullification, too.
But Jones said newer and fairer jury selection procedures help eliminate such biases.
"If we cannot depend upon 12 independent individuals to sit down in careful deliberations and come back with their best verdict to be rendered in the spirit of justice, fairness and mercy ... and to mitigate each others' prejudices and inclinations by their consultation as a group... then we both underestimate and fail to understand what our founding fathers left us as a heritage of justice in this country," she said.
Commentary:
Robert Birdwell - 11:28am Feb 13, 2003 (2320. 4362/4369)
Legal research/history
In re: The Conviction of Ed Rosenthal for Growing Medicinal Marijuana:
Why It Was Wrong to Prosecute By SHERRY F. COLB, Wednesday, February 12, 2003.
"Prerogative courts and ignorant juries:"
Just a few historical comments, professor:
1.) The United States is not a "sovereign," nor are any of the several states. "Sovereignty" is a religious concept, hatched by Constantine around 325 AD, requiring it be bestowed by God and ratified by the "state church." James I of England preached the concept and his son, Charles I, lost his head over it January 30, 1649. The English Bill of Rights, of 1689 outlaws the concept, and the first ten words of our own First Amendment make it impossible to "establish the religious mechanisms," or to bring it into law, in America.
2.) States do not and cannot have "rights," any more than any inanimate object can hold or exercise a "right." States, as fictional institutions, are delegated certain "enumerated powers."
3.) There is no legal argument to be proferred or analyzed in reference to the opinions of Attorney General John Ashcroft. The man is a sincere, but dangerously ignorant, incompetent incapable of anything but acting in the fog of zealous, Medieval beliefs.
4.) Ashcroft has re-instituted the High Commission; the Privvy Council, and the Court of the Star Chamber. The large numbers of corrupt or incompetent federal and state judges, who are now firmly entrenched, are operating prerogative courts dispensing "justice" absent law.
5.) You would do well to teach these future judges some history and some law, and, especially, the difference between "judicial discretion," which exists, and "sovereign prerogative," which does not. Otherwise, the fate of Charles I will necessarily have to be repeated over and over again.
US NV: Editorial: Harassing Law-Abiding Citizens
Pubdate: Thu, 23 Jan 2003
Source: Las Vegas Review-Journal (NV)
Copyright: 2003 Las Vegas Review-Journal
Contact: letters@lvrj.com
Website: http://www.lvrj.com/
HARASSING LAW-ABIDING CITIZENS
Federal Case Against California Medical Marijuana
Club Sends Chilling Message
The federal government's harassment of marijuana activist Ed Rosenthal continues in a San Francisco courtroom, as prosecutors hope to lock up the 58-year-old - who's raising pot plants for a Bay Area medicinal marijuana clinic - for the rest of his life.
This is a frightening example of a federal government that's hellbent on trampling the will of the people, the compassionate treatment of patients, and even local law enforcement agencies ... all for the purpose of prosecuting the drug war. The lesson here should be a chilling one for Nevadans as well as residents of the Golden State.
Mr. Rosenthal was arrested after federal agents seized some 3,000 marijuana plants from his warehouse in Oakland, and charged him with violating federal anti-drug laws. He was growing the plants for the Harm Reduction Center, a local medical marijuana club, and was deputized by the city of Oakland as an officer authorized to distribute medicinal pot under California's 1996 Proposition 215.
His attorney planned to argue that the federal government had no jurisdiction in this case, since it cannot regulate intrastate commerce, and that law enforcement agents violated the Ninth and 10th Amendments, which limit the power of the federal government to override state laws.
In a jaw-dropping move, however, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer has ruled that the jury cannot be told any of this. In a heated exchange with the attorney, Judge Breyer said the information was "irrelevant" for the purposes of this prosecution, though the ruling could be challenged on appeal.
The judge's decision is not only an unconscionable denial of Mr. Rosenthal's right to present evidence in his own defense, it's a gross misreading of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2001 decision banning medical marijuana.
In Justice Clarence Thomas' opinion, the majority ruled that the "medical necessity defense" used by advocates of medicinal marijuana does not overrule federal drug laws. But, Justice Thomas wrote, a number of issues - including questions about regulating intrastate commerce and the role of states' rights - remain to be resolved. Future courts must decide whether the federal government indeed possesses the authority to stop the distribution of marijuana for medicinal purposes in every instance.
Nevada officials remain optimistic that the medical marijuana initiative approved by Silver State voters would survive a federal challenge. And while Judge Breyer's actions can be rectified on appeal, federal agents continue to intimidate, incarcerate and seize the property of citizens who are acting within the laws duly enacted by the citizens of the states and their representatives.
Trust-buster -- Ashcroft kicks the dog once again
By Peter Schrag -- Bee Columnist
Sacramento Bee
Published 2:15 a.m. PST
Wednesday, February 12, 2003
Contact Author at: pschrag@sacbee.com
Please click here for more about Ed Rosenthal and The Trial
A few more victories like the one the feds just got in their prosecution of Ed Rosenthal, Oakland's officially deputized medical marijuana grower, and they may be lucky if they get convictions in the future of even the most hardened dealers.
Shortly after they voted to convict, five of the jurors held a press conference to repudiate their own verdict: Had they been allowed to hear testimony that Rosenthal had been growing his pot plants for the medical uses permitted under California's Proposition 215, they said, they would not have convicted.
But they weren't allowed to hear any of that. Federal Judge Charles Breyer ruled that California law had no bearing on the federal drug law under which Rosenthal was tried.
The defense hoped to argue that since the federal law immunized state and local drug enforcement officers against federal prosecution, Rosenthal, as a city-deputized official, should have been able to cite Proposition 215, California's medical marijuana initiative, and his function under it.
Breyer, the thoughtful and respected judge who blocked that defense, is not to blame. It's not the job of jurors to sort out conflicts between federal and state law, if any; in any case, federal law trumps state law. If state law were allowed to nullify federal law, the South might still be segregated.
But that didn't mitigate the frustration of the jurors who felt manipulated or the clumsiness and stupidity of the federal government in bringing the case.
The stupidity was underlined in a White House report issued by the Office of Management and Budget almost at the same moment as the jurors' press conference last week. Castigating DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, for its ineffectiveness in stemming the flow and distribution of narcotics in the United States, the report concluded the agency "is unable to demonstrate progress in reducing the availability of illegal drugs in the United States." The DEA, whose budget has doubled in the last seven years, now gets nearly $1.6 billion a year.
At a time when national security and terrorism are stretching all law enforcement resources, only politics, vindictiveness or bureaucratic clumsiness can explain the government's extraordinary attacks on state medical marijuana laws and those who supply the sick under their provisions. You'd think they'd have more urgent things to do with DEA agents and federal prosecutors.
Bill Zimmerman, who ran the campaign for the passage of Proposition 215 and similar laws in other states, says the feds are obsessed with the medical marijuana issue because it raises medical and scientific questions about marijuana prohibition in general. And since marijuana "is the backbone of the drug war" -- the place where the lion's share of drug war funds are spent -- people such as Rosenthal become prime targets.
But the explanation may lie just as much in the frustrations and personal rigidity of Attorney General John Ashcroft, who, in the face of the ongoing terror threat, the unsolved anthrax attacks and the bumbling of the FBI and CIA both before and after 9/11, has had precious little success to report.
Worse, with every passing day, Ashcroft's inflexibility will make success still more difficult to achieve. Two weeks ago, it was disclosed that Ashcroft ordered federal prosecutors in New York state to pursue the death penalty against murder suspect Jairo Zapata even after they'd reached a plea agreement under which Zapata agreed to cooperate in an investigation in exchange for a life sentence.
Ashcroft voided the deal so that, according to his spokespeople, there would be consistency in the application of the federal death penalty law. Ashcroft has upset a number of U.S. prosecutors by ordering pursuit of the death penalty even though they'd recommended against it.
But even if that brought consistency, many prosecutors believe it will also bring an accumulation of prosecutorial problems as defendants become reluctant to cooperate with a Justice Department whose plea bargains can't be trusted or whose prosecutors will be reluctant to plea bargain capital cases.
The aftermath of the Rosenthal case has brought renewed talk about legislation creating some formal state-run system of marijuana production and distribution, complete with state registries and other legal processes.
Supporters of such a system, which would serve the patients who use medical marijuana to combat the loss of appetite, nausea and other debilitating effects of their diseases and the medicines, particularly chemotherapy, used to treat them, say it would be harder for the feds to attack.
That's not likely to happen -- Gov. Gray Davis killed similar legislation before -- nor is it certain to work.
But continued prosecution of individual suppliers of medical marijuana under the gag rule invoked in the Rosenthal prosecution is almost certain to raise the resistance of jurors to convicting anyone of marijuana charges. It's a hell of way to build trust in the system. "Another such victory," said King Pyrrhos after his bloody triumph over the Romans in 279 B.C., "and we are undone."
About the Writer
Peter Schrag can be reached at Box 15779, Sacramento, CA 95852-0779 or at pschrag@sacbee.com.
