The DEA raided a marijuana sellers club yesterday in San Francisco. In addition to the weed, they confiscated a shotgun and a 0.22 pistol.

Well, I'm certainly glad that, with terrorists threatening the nation, our federal law enforcement officials are applying all necessary resources to making sure that cancer patients don't get high, even though California voters granted them the legal right to do so.

So let me get this straight. The same federal government that pays for ads to not buy drugs because it will aid the terrorists, shuts down a legal (under state law) purveyer of marijuana, forcing sick cancer patients to get their drugs illegally, thus (theoretically) aiding terrorists?

OK...

And by the way, whatever happened to that quaint old (apparent) irrelevance, the 10th Amendment?

Re: "Good Priorities, Guys"

>The DEA raided a marijuana sellers club
>yesterday in San Francisco. In addition to the
>weed, they confiscated a shotgun and a 0.22
>pistol.

First, those are called "buyers' clubs" or "growers' co-ops". That is because they are organized by patients or duly designated caregivers to permit the patients to grow or purchase their medicine. I met many of these patients years ago, and they really are patients.
Most are physically debilitated, and some are in wheelchairs. All depend upon cannabis to maintain some marginal quality of life, or even just to stay alive, as in the case of AIDS wasting syndrome.

Second: Not to be viewed as soft on crime, the DEA dynamited the doors of one club to gain entry. These patients, had they been present, would have let them in if they had knocked.

Third: I've already read accounts that the raids were based on information from a mole or provocateur they had promised light treatment for some crime and placed in one of the clubs. That may be the source of the guns. The DEA is not noted for honesty.

See http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v02/n238/a08.html?397

The clubs and their supporters may be politically leftish, but in that they are not much different from most San Franciscans. That doesn't mean they are not correct in being outraged.

>Well, I'm certainly glad that, with terrorists
>threatening the nation, our federal law
>enforcement officials are applying all necessary
>resources to making sure that cancer patients
>don't get high, even though California voters
>granted them the legal right to do so.

As I once heard Bob Randall (RIP), who had smoked DEA-supplied cannabis for decades before his death, explain: "I smoke 10 joints a day. I don't get high. I get to not go blind."

Bob Died last year, at age 53, of causes entirely unrelated to cannabis. When I met him, he was sharp as a tack and very active in intellectually challenging tasks, writing and organizing, hardly a bleery-eyed lamebrain. Most other patients I met were similarly clear thinking and acting.

>So let me get this straight. The same federal
>government that pays for ads to not buy drugs
>because it will aid the terrorists, shuts down a
>legal (under state law) purveyer of marijuana,
>forcing sick cancer patients to get their drugs
>illegally, thus (theoretically) aiding
>terrorists?

Maybe you don't understand the nature of prohibitionists and prohibitionism. Like Islamists and Communists, they cannot abide anything that even appears to be a crack in their entrenched absolutist regimes.

As one of the prohibitionist forefathers, Sen. Henry W. Blair wrote in 1907, "The temperance movement must include all poisonous substances which create or excite unnatural appetite, and international prohibition is the goal."

Prohibitionists are nothing more than ideologically motivated gangsters, and the enforcement gang for their racket has evolved into the DEA and the various state "narcotics bureaus" in the USA.

As the prohibitionists' ambitions increase, the laws they can impose and enforce proliferate. During the Somalian "peace keeping" fiasco where some warlords' soldiers were chewing Qat, Congress granted DEA the power to declare a drug illegal unilaterally. That power is permanent until Congress changes the law.

Ultimately the prohibitionists seek to control what is permissible for every human on the planet to consume, produce, say, or even think.

Prohibitionism has no legitimate function in a free society, and prohibitionists know it. Therefore they must maintain power by political frauds like the "war on (some) drugs", and by brutally silencing all opposition to, or apparent breaches of, their various legal regimes, especially when it is easy to do so.

Imprisonment is a very effective silencer. They get a double value if their outspoken opponent dies, as Peter McWilliams did.

If prohibitionism ever falls politically, only divine mercy will prevent prohibitionists being treated by an outraged citizenry as the Stasi, the Taliban and the KGB were treated by their victims.

>OK...
>
>And by the way, whatever happened to that quaint
>old (apparent) irrelevance, the 10th Amendment?

Wishful thinking. The prohibitionist ideology is far too thoroughly ingrained in government at present to let a silly thing like the Constitution matter. Former "Drug Czar" Bill Bennett already long ago said "We can't let the Constitution stand in the way of the war on drugs."

With edicts like that, there's no room for silly "constitutional" questions, much less opposition.

Apologies for the long commentary, but these raids were outrageous.

Quin