Drug Warrior's Shadow Looms Over California's Pot Clubs

The man tapped by President Bush to be the top federal prosecutor for the San Francisco Bay Area was a hardline drug warrior during his tenure in the same post in the 1980s -- which could signal an escalation of the administration's crackdown on California's flourishing medical-marijuana clubs.

Bush named Joseph Russoniello, 66, on Nov. 15 to be U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California, which covers the state's coastal regions from Monterey to the Oregon line. If confirmed by the Senate, he would fill the position formerly held by Kevin Ryan, one of the eight federal prosecutors fired last December.

The Senate is expected to take up his nomination next month. No formal opposition has developed, but Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) -- who butted heads with Russoniello in the late '80s while investigating allegations about the Nicaraguan Contras' cocaine trafficking in California -- is "looking into this nomination very closely," according to a Senate aide.

The appointment has many in California's medical-marijuana community wondering if Russoniello would intensify the crackdown on the state's cannabis clinics. As federal prosecutor for the Northern District from 1982 to 1990, he was a cofounder of the CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Planting) program, an annual series of paramilitary federal-state raids on pot farmers and their neighbors. He also accompanied Nancy Reagan to the Oakland elementary school where she first intoned her anti-drug mantra, "Just say no," in 1984.

Russoniello fitted in well with the Reagan administration's crime policies, which switched enforcement priorities from white-collar crime to drug offenses. (In fact, Rudolph Giuliani, then the third-ranking Justice Department official, interviewed him for the job.) The Reagan "war on drugs" whacked marijuana farmers and small-time black crack dealers with five-year mandatory minimums and intensified forfeiture laws so that someone caught copping $50 worth of dope could have their car confiscated. In a 1994 interview with Smoke and Mirrors author Dan Baum, Russoniello recalled that he was happy that the department was going to get tough on drug users as well as on dealers; that he believed drug treatment was a government-sponsored crutch, that methadone maintenance merely prolonged addicts' dependence; and that the widespread pot farming in Northern California was like "an open wound on our prayer hand."

"We don't need another pot warrior trying to run roughshod over California's medical-marijuana law," California NORML head Dale Gieringer wrote to supporters, calling the nomination "an ominous development." The Bay Area is home to 36 of the state's more than 200 remedial-reefer dispensaries, including four licensed by the city of Oakland, and the Northern District also covers Mendocino County, which lets medical growers cultivate up to 25 plants per patient, and Humboldt County, which is to pot farming what Nashville is to country music.

Despite Proposition 215, the state's 1996 law legalizing the cultivation and distribution of medical cannabis, it remains inescapably illegal under federal law. The Supreme Court has twice, in 2001 and 2005, rejected Californians' attempts to win exceptions that would allow a legal supply.

On December 13, after six years of litigation stemming from the 2001 case, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld a lower court's injunction barring three pot clinics -- including one licensed by Oakland -- from growing or distributing marijuana. In an unpublished opinion posted on the Internet by several legal sites, the Ninth Circuit held that it could not invalidate the federal prohibition of medical marijuana, because the ban had a rational basis and did not violate fundamental constitutional rights.