Medical Pot Users Get Burnt

Lynn and Judy Osburn were preparing for a day of working with their horses on Sept. 28, 2001, when they heard the deep thump of a helicopter suddenly shattering the silence of the Ozena Valley. Sitting in the kitchen of their house in the Los Padres National Forest, their hearts sank. A line of 15 unmarked SUVs and one Ventura County Sheriff's car pulled up to their horse gate. As the caravan roared up the gravel drive, their four dogs exploded in furious barking and horses scattered through the sage scrub in a panic.

The Osburns knew instantly what was going down. Every county and federal official from Ventura to downtown L.A. knew they grew marijuana; the Osburns had met with them and discussed it openly. Somewhere on the property was allegedly a field of 270 tall, stinky plants about ready to harvest. Lynn, 53, and Judy, 50, gathered themselves. They stepped into the brilliant mountain light, hands high so no one would have any reason to shoot.

"Their lead investigator told us they didn't want to be there," says Lynn, sitting at his kitchen table. "They had argued for a long time with their superiors that this wasn't what they should be doing. They were very apologetic. It was a very strange occasion."

Under California state law, the Osburns' bumper weed crop was perfectly legal. They were the state-approved growers for the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Center (LACRC), a West Hollywood medical marijuana co-op operating legally under Prop 215, the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, which legalizes the use of pot as physician-prescribed medicine. The dope cultivated by the Osburns would relieve the symptoms of 960 registered patients in L.A., who used it to treat the wasting associated with AIDS, chemotherapy nausea, chronic pain and glaucoma, among other conditions.

But the agents who poured out of these vehicles, some dressed in camouflage and many wearing ski masks, weren't bound by state law. They were mostly L.A.-based agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Under the federal Controlled Substances Act, pot is a Schedule 1 narcotic, which is defined as having "no medicinal use." Therefore, in the Twilight Zone that is the federal bureaucracy, medical marijuana doesn't exist. They had a warrant from the US Attorney's office in L.A.

Since 2001, the Bush Administration -- and U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, Drug Czar John Walters, and ex-DEA director Asa Hutchinson, in particular -- have openly defied the sovereignty of California voters by raiding pot co-ops and making selective arrests of 30 medical pot users and growers. They have gone after the highest-profile individuals, including many who passed the original ballot initiative. Some have been sent up on federal prison sentences as long as 10 years. The Osburns were just such a catch: They had been the key organizers of Prop 215 support in Ventura County.

"This is their strategy, and I think it's backfiring," says Hilary McQuie of Americans for Safe Access, a pro-medical marijuana group. "Every one of these cases is demoralizing to the DEA, and builds up public sentiment against them."

This new crackdown, which has isolated the DEA from local cops and splintered local drug task forces across the state, has now made pot into a conservative issue. President Bush, who campaigned on a pro-state's rights agenda concerning potentially racist matters like flying the Confederate flag over the South Carolina statehouse, or local environmental control, has reversed himself and increased federal power in order to fight voter-approved marijuana. Medical pot is legal in some form in nine states, but only California activists have been the victims of the administration's moral agenda.

The state's rights implications of this assault have now greatly overshadowed Ashcroft's crowing about the need to prosecute the Drug War or fight terrorism. An unlikely coalition of staunch conservatives and outraged liberals have backed two new bills in Congress to address this conflict.