EXPERTS DON'T SEE ROSENTHAL POT CASE AS A LANDMARK

Feds Not Likely to Ease Off on Tough Policies

Analysts were skeptical Thursday of predictions by medical marijuana
advocacy groups that a judge's refusal to sentence Bay Area pot icon
Ed Rosenthal to prison would eventually turn around the federal
government's hard-nosed policies on the drug.

A rebuff in a single case - even a high-profile prosecution like the
Rosenthal case - probably won't slow the Bush administration's
crackdown on medical cannabis in California, several commentators agreed.

"It seems to me unlikely that the feds are going to give up very
easily on this issue," said Jeffrey Miron, an economics professor at
Boston University and research associate at the libertarian
Independent Institute.

"I'm highly doubtful whether the Bush administration will allow one
federal district judge to stop its program," said Evan Lee, a
professor of criminal law and federal courts at the University of
California's Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.

But Lee said Wednesday's ruling by U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer
"lends a great measure of legitimacy" to medical marijuana advocates'
criticism of federal policies.

In light of Breyer's solid judicial reputation, Lee said, some public
officials may conclude that "the political center of gravity isn't
where (they) thought it was," a shift that might ultimately force a
change in administration policy.

Breyer's stunning decision, in a packed San Francisco courtroom,
spared Rosenthal from the five-year prison sentence normally required
for cultivating more than 100 marijuana plants. The judge cited the
"extraordinary, unique circumstances of this case" -- referring to
California's medical marijuana law and to Rosenthal's belief that he
was growing marijuana legally as part of a city-sponsored program in
Oakland.

National marijuana advocacy groups had been hungering for a legal
victory and seized on Breyer's decision as an omen.

'Beginning of the End'

For example, Robert Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy
Project, called the ruling "the beginning of the end of the federal
war on medical marijuana patients" and said Rosenthal's case "will be
seen as the tipping point, the moment when it became obvious the law
had to change."

Steph Sherer, executive director of Americans for Safe Access, said
the ruling should encourage federal judges in other cases to give
defendants "a full hearing based on all the evidence." She said more
than a dozen federal medical marijuana prosecutions are pending in
California and at least seven growers have been sentenced to prison,
some for terms as long as 10 years.

If Breyer's ruling is upheld on appeal, other federal judges in
California may follow his lead, and the Justice Department would
probably stop prosecuting cases in the state, said John Eastman, law
professor at Chapman College in Orange County and director of the
Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence.

But both he and Lee, the Hastings professor, said the administration
was likely to appeal the ruling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court,
with a good chance of a reversal that would send Rosenthal to prison.

Federal prosecutors were typically tight-lipped, saying only that no
decision had been made on an appeal. But Richard Meyer, spokesman for
the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in San Francisco, said,
"We're not deterred one bit."

Meyer also said Rosenthal's speech to supporters Wednesday, calling
for the repeal of all marijuana laws, was evidence that "the so-called
medical marijuana initiative was a smoke screen, that the real agenda
of these people was to legalize not only marijuana but all drugs."

Broad Impact

Miron, the Boston professor whose forthcoming book, "Drug War Crimes,"
endorses drug legalization, said the federal government is right in
one respect: Medical marijuana legalization laws have the potential of
crippling overall marijuana enforcement.

"These laws have an enormous impact because there are so many
conditions for which you can use marijuana as medicine," he said. "The
feds understand that (allowing medical marijuana) would open the
floodgates" and will maintain their hard line on the issue, he said.

For the same reason, he said, congressional legislation that would
allow a medical defense to federal marijuana prosecutions in states
with medical marijuana laws will face unyielding opposition from the
DEA and other federal drug enforcers, and a certain veto from
President Bush.


Pubdate: Fri, 06 Jun 2003
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Page: A - 8
Webpage:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/06/06/MN63135.DTL
Copyright: 2003 Hearst Communications Inc.
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