Santa Cruz, California City Officials to Hand Out Marijuana

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (Reuters) - Santa Cruz city leaders plan
to take part in a public pot giveaway next week to protest a
recent federal raid of a medicinal marijuana cooperative
that served mostly terminally ill members.

City Councilman Ed Porter said on Thursday he wants to show
solidarity with residents in the beach community located
some 70 miles south of San Francisco who are outraged at the
federal raid last week that occurred without the support or
knowledge of local officials.Federal agents also arrested the cooperative's owners
Michael and Valerie Corral, who were instrumental in
drafting the trailblazing 1996 California law that allowed
patients and their care-givers to grow marijuana for their
own medicine.

"Terminally ill people are being denied the use of marijuana
even though they have prescriptions because the Feds came in
here and make a bust," Porter said. "I wouldn't be surprised
if most of the city council participates because the whole
community is up in arms about this."

The event, which is not sponsored by the city, is expected
to take place outside City Hall on Tuesday. Those wishing to
pick up marijuana will need to show a prescription for the
drug which is legal in California for medical use, Porter
said.

Richard Meyer, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement
Administration, said he was "appalled" by the plan but
declined to detail whether federal agents would be at the
event to make arrests.

"We are in shock, we are appalled and dismayed that elected
officials would flaunt
(sic) a federal law that way," Meyer said.
"To us it is saying in Santa Cruz you are only entitled to
obey the laws you agree with."

California is one of nine U.S. states where voters have
passed laws allowing doctors to prescribe marijuana to
patients suffering from illnesses ranging from AIDS and
cancer to glaucoma and multiple sclerosis.

Federal law enforcement authorities, however, have taken a
far more severe view of medical marijuana than their local
counterparts in the nation's most populous state and have
recently been cracking down on the patient clubs.

The U.S. medical marijuana movement, which gained strength
in California during the height of the AIDS epidemic, also
received a setback in 2001 when the U.S. Supreme Court
unanimously upheld the federal ban on marijuana.

But California's own state Supreme Court recently took an
opposite tack, ruling for the first time that ailing
Californians who use or grow marijuana with a physician's
approval cannot be prosecuted in state courts -- currently
the venue for most marijuana cases.