Pubdate: Thu, 22 Nov 2001
Source: Denver Rocky Mountain News (CO)
Copyright: 2001 Denver Publishing Co.
Contact:  http://www.denver-rmn.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/371
Author: Cord MacGuire
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/ashcroft.htm (Ashcroft, John)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)

WHO WILL PROTECT US WHEN ASHCROFT KNOCKS?

While local editorialists have generally noted with concern the 
recent assault on Oregon's benevolent assisted-suicide policy by our 
ever-earnest Attorney General John Ashcroft, I have heard little 
comment on his even more sweeping efforts to roll back California's 
citizen-initiated medical marijuana program.

For five years now, Californians suffering from a variety of medical 
conditions have been entitled to legally prescribed cannabis.

Attorney General Ashcroft is evidently quite upset by this state of 
affairs and has lately sent in armed drug agents to shut down the 
state's authorized cannabis centers, seizing nearly 1,000 
confidential medical records in draconian raids. Doctors and sick 
patients have been terrorized by Ashcroft's threat to arrest and 
imprison them under widely discredited federal prohibition laws, 
intially passed in 1937 over the vocal objections of the American 
Medical Association.

It is an outrage that Congress refuses to revise federal law to 
prevent this abuse of prosecutorial power. Colorado voters, patients 
and caregivers must wonder just who will protect their medical rights 
should Ashcroft turn his guns on our own state's recently enacted 
medical cannabis program. Our elected officials' scandalous silence 
on this question leaves little hope for humane reforms.

Cord MacGuire Boulder
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