MARIJUANA—AMERICA’S MOST PROFITABLE PLANT NOW BRINGS AN EARLY WARNING OF SUBVERTED CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS, BRAINWASHED JURIES, BLOATED FEDERAL POWER, JUDICIAL RACISM, AND HAMSTRUNG LAWYERS.

We all appreciate that California voters passed Proposition 215, which allows for medical usage of marijuana for seriously ill Californians: a person with a recommendation from a doctor is entitled to grow and use marijuana. Now legal authorities at all levels of law enforcement admit up front that they are doing everything they can to de-actualize that law. That is, they will arrest people who have doctors’ recommendations. They will seize plants grown by terminally ill people and turn them over to the district attorney. Most of the time, if it’s a bona fide medical-use case, district attorneys won’t prosecute, but the medicines—the marijuana plants and the marijuana in smoking form—are seized and never returned.

Worse than that, they outlaw the marijuana clubs and the people who grow for them. They give lip service to the legalization of milk, and then outlaw the cow.

Through the supremacy clause, federal authorities have claimed the right to interdict these organizations. Prosecutors have applied mandatory sentencing minimums using the federal system, which does not recognize 215. They have sought and accomplished the closure of a number of clubs through federal injunctions.

The feds, claiming separate-sovereign status, are stultifying the will of the electorate. That’s a slap in the face of the democratic process, and a slap in the face of the law-and-order approach that 215 has established. They always say, "If you don’t like the law, then change it!" Then when you finally change just one of the untold numbers of onerous laws, they won’t actualize it, they won’t give it full faith and credit, they won’t even honestly enforce it.

Back in the sixties, we believed that marijuana was going to be decriminalized. We’re now in the latter part of the nineties. For the small percentage of decriminalization that applies to medical use, law enforcement and often district attorneys won’t give us the benefit of the law. They’re very punitive and very retaliatory. They don’t like the law, and they’re not fulfilling the mandate of the electorate.

See
California Taskforce On Prop 215 Reportedly Recommends Registration System
To Protect Patients Against Rogue Law Enforcement

I’m painting a very grim and pessimistic picture of what’s going on in the judicial process. Normally, I’m an optimistic, positive-oriented person. But I think that any criminal-defense practitioner will tell you that the war on drugs is a false premise, an illusion. Under this rubric in the last decade or so, we as a culture have been effectively stripped of constitutional rights. Consider motions to suppress evidence, where the defendant claims unlawful seizure, or that his right to privacy has been invaded, or that the police had no probable cause or no search warrant. In the sixties and early seventies, we would win four out of five of these cases because law enforcement typically failed to meet legal requirements. Now, we’re lucky to win one out of twenty. Judges do not want to apply constitutional standards with full force and vigor against law enforcement, because they’re fearful of being viewed as lenient in this war on drugs.

Jurors have become mad dogs, they have been so conditioned by media and police propaganda. I got a case in Boston where the jurors believed, almost, that marijuana was shot into your veins like heroin. They had no idea what marijuana was, they were merely recipients of propaganda. In a political drug case where law enforcement’s word is pitted against a private citizen’s word, attorneys will now say, "You have to establish five reasonable doubts; one reasonable doubt won’t do it." Juries want to adopt the prosecution version. They’ve been brainwashed. They believe that crime is rampant, that drugs lead ultimately to robbery. We’re in a very, very constitutionally threatened atmosphere based on the mass mentality of the populace.

I can still win a jury trial. At this office, we do marijuana case after marijuana case, and we win many of them. But it’s nothing like the sixties, when all levels of society showed a robust interest in actualizing constitutional rights and expanding the common denominator for justice. It is fairly dismal out there now. We’re hopeful that the pendulum will swing back. We look at things like elections (in this state, the governor’s, attorney general’s, and senatorial races). Ultimately, we look to the media to promote more honesty so the general populace isn’t spoon-fed war-on-crime propaganda. We look to other levels of media, to the film industry, to change a lot of its crime or police hero-worship plots and narrative. If we can’t turn public attitude, law enforcement, and the courts around, we are heading toward the worst repression in our country’s history.