cannabisnews.com: City Joins Medical Pot Use Lawsuit





City Joins Medical Pot Use Lawsuit
Posted by CN Staff on April 24, 2003 at 08:07:06 PT
By Josh Richman, Staff Writer
Source: Tri-Valley Herald 
The city and county of Santa Cruz, a medical marijuana cooperative and seven patients sued federal officials Wednesday to prevent further raids like the one conducted upon the cooperative last year. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, claims the plaintiffs' civil rights were violated by the Drug Enforcement Administration's raid of the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana. 
Attorney General John Ashcroft, acting DEA administrator John B. Brown III and White House drug czar John Walters should be barred from ordering any more such raids and should have to pay compensatory and punitive damages for the Sept. 5 WAMM raid, the lawsuit says. "It's quite significant, it's really unprecedented -- there haven't been any prior lawsuits where local governments have joined in," said Santa Clara University School of Law Professor Gerald Uelmen, the plaintiffs' co-counsel. Santa Cruz County Supervisor Mardi Wormhoudt said she's "proud the county has the opportunity to raise these issues in a formal way." WAMM co-founder Valerie Corral, one of the case's plaintiffs, called the city's and county's participation "monumental, it's historic." "I don't think anything like this has happened before, and it speaks to the amount of responsiveness on the part of the politicians who represent our community," she said. California voters in 1996 approved medical marijuana medicinal use and the city and county of Santa Cruz have passed ordinances supporting and protecting such use. Federal law still bans all cultivation, possession or use. WAMM's farm at Corral's home in Davenport, north of Santa Cruz, was among several California medical marijuana sites the DEA raided in 2001 and 2002. Agents seized and destroyed WAMM's marijuana plants, but no criminal charges have been filed. The DEA has said it's merely enforcing federal law. Government officials wouldn't comment on the pending lawsuit Wednesday. This lawsuit's plaintiff patients are Corral, who has epilepsy; Eladio V. Acosta of Watsonville, undergoing chemotherapy for throat cancer; James Daniel Baehr of Santa Cruz, suffering pain from extensive, terminal cancer; Michael Cheslosky of Aptos, who has AIDS; Jennifer Lee Hentz of Palo Alto, undergoing chemotherapy for lymphatic cancer; Harold F. Margolin of Santa Cruz, who has cervical spondylosis, or arthritis of the neck, and Dorothy Gibbs of Santa Cruz, who has post-polio syndrome. Gibbs, 93, is WAMM's oldest member. The patients claim the federal officials violated their Fifth and Ninth Amendment rights to control the circumstances of their own deaths; to ameliorate pain; to maintain bodily integrity; to preserve life, and to consult with their physicians regarding treatment and then act on those recommendations. The federal officials overstepped their authority because Congress can regulate only interstate commerce, the lawsuit says: "Congress has made no finding that the intrastate cultivation and use of medical marijuana by seriously ill patients with the approval of their physicians, as permitted by California's Compassionate Use Act, has any effect whatsoever on interstate commerce." The raid also violated the state's and county's Tenth Amendment right to implement their own laws, the lawsuit claims. And the lawsuit claims WAMM and its patients should be deemed immune from future raids because WAMM has been deputized under Santa Cruz's medical marijuana ordinance, and federal law says duly authorized officers can't be prosecuted. Corral said WAMM "worked hard at being accountable and credible" under local and state laws, so the raid was "a great affront to the democratic process" as well as "an injustice to people who are sick and dying." Uelmen said the federal officials "really did cross a significant line when they took on a group with this level of local support, law enforcement support, and a real compassionate agenda. This is like a hospice serving the needs of dying people. "What really made WAMM unique was the squeaky-clean way they were running the operation, the kind of closed system they had established so there really wasn't any leakage, any commercial activity -- they're not selling the stuff. This is a cooperative of patients growing their own medicine." Wormhoudt said "the county is supportive of the efforts WAMM makes to provide very ill people with an opportunity to mitigate pain and manage symptoms." "If they did not do that work, in many cases, it would be the county people would need to turn to," she said. "During very hard budget times, that would be a difficult thing for us to do -- we can barely meet the demand for services we already have."Note: Court action aims to prevent further raids on marijuana cooperative.Source: Tri-Valley Herald (CA)Author: Josh Richman, Staff WriterPublished: Thursday, April 24, 2003 Copyright: 2003 MediaNews Group, Inc.Website: http://www.trivalleyherald.com/Contact: apacciorini angnewspapers.comRelated Articles & Web Sites:WAMMhttp://www.wamm.org/Pictures from WAMM Protesthttp://freedomtoexhale.com/eventpics.htmCalifornia City Sues Over U.S. Drug Policy http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread16040.shtmlSanta Cruz Sues Feds Over Raids http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread16038.shtmlCity, County Join Pot Lawsuit Against DEA http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread16028.shtml
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