Yes, we're at war ... against sick Americans

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sun, 14 Oct 2001 10:56:22 GMT

FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED OCT. 14, 2001
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
Yes, we're at war ... against sick Americans

As "we watch a war unfold on the television -- a 'good' war to protect us from terrorists ... it raises some questions," writes L.J. Carden of Meadow Vista, Calif., in a Wednesday letter to the editor of California's daily Auburn Journal.

"Why then are precious resources -- specially trained, heavily armed and already on the federal payroll 'home security types' -- attacking a licensed medical physician and her attorney husband in rural El Dorado County?" asked Carden, whose letter was headlined: "Good war vs. pot raid."

"Shouldn't their goal be to protect us from really dangerous people?"

Federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents on Sept. 28 seized files that contain legal and medical records of more than 5,000 medicinal marijuana patients in El Dorado County when they raided the home and office of Dr. Mollie Fry, a physician, and her husband, Dale Schafer, a lawyer who earlier had announced he will run for El Dorado County district attorney. Fry and Schafer run the California Medical Research Center in Cool, Calif. The patient files remain sealed pending an Oct. 22 court hearing.

"In any law book you look up to answer this problem it's going to say it's illegal in the margins," J. David Nick, a San Francisco attorney hired by CMRC, told the Tahoe Daily Tribune. "These type of records are confidential in the eyes of the law. It falls under attorney-client privilege. It's a huge invasion of personal privacy that chills one to the bone."

Police and prosecutors respond that the doctor-patient privilege is voided when there's fraud, and they're investigating doctors who they believe are writing recommendations for marijuana when it's not medically justified -- as though police bully-boys are in any position to second-guess doctors on their medical recommendations, and as though these same goons would ever admit there are any legitimate medical uses of marijuana.

Fry is herself a breast cancer survivor who is a medical marijuana patient. Cancer has recently reappeared in her blood, according to Jaimie Daniel, an employee of CMRC. In the Sept. 28 raid, the federal government confiscated 32 marijuana plants Fry kept for personal use.

"The two-year-old clinic in the town of Cool charges $200 to determine if people can use marijuana for medical conditions from cancer to chronic pain," The AP reports. "If they qualify under 1996's Proposition 215, which bars criminal prosecution for using marijuana for medical conditions, they are referred to cannabis 'clubs' elsewhere for marijuana."

A federal magistrate will hear arguments Oct. 22 to decide if the records of the more than 5,000 northern California prospective medical marijuana users can be viewed by federal authorities. Chief Magistrate Gregory Hollows set the hearing Oct. 4 in a courtroom packed with medical marijuana users, several in wheelchairs, according to The Associated Press.

Since its passage, Prop. 215 has been tested in several court cases, including the Placer County trial of Libertarian Party gubernatorial candidate Steve Kubby. Kubby was acquitted last February on marijuana possession-for-sale charges after a 1998 raid netted 256 plants at his Olympic Valley home -- but has fled to Canada after being threatened with jail for refusing to pay $4,500 in court costs and fines arising from a related misdemeanor conviction for possession of a mushroom stem and a dried cactus button.

An adrenal cancer survivor who attributes his survival to his use of medical marijuana, Steve Kubby says he would be deprived of the medicinal herb and would die, thus losing his ability to support and protect his family, if he allowed himself to be jailed.

Attorney Schafer and Dr. Fry weren't arrested during the Sept. 28 searches and remain free, with no charges filed against them.

"This is a big, big story," Steve Kubby told me Thursday. "I can't think of another instance where police go into a doctor's office and an attorney's office and just take all their files. It's unprecedented and it's outrageous. ... It's a very important story because if the doctor-patient and attorney-client privilege is breached, then we have no more rights in this country, none. If you can't speak to your most trusted advisers without the police being able to see what was said, then the Constitution is gone, the Bill of Rights is gone, and we've just witnessed a slow-motion police coup d'etat."

What's going on here is perfectly clear. We were all taught in our high-school civics classes that if you want to change the law, all you have to do is get a majority of voters to agree with you -- which is exactly what backers of California's humane Proposition 215 did.

But these California prosecutors and so-called "police" now reveal they don't believe in -- or honor -- that system at all. Where are the ACLU and the federal civil rights authorities, as these goons now reveal themselves to be an armed gang thoroughly undeserving of any claims to being in the "law enforcement" business, instead harassing and ruining the lives of sick people, little different in their tactics from their brethren in the deep South 40 years ago, breaking heads and turning the firehoses on "uppity Negroes" who claimed to have some kind of a "right" to sit at white lunch counters?

Represented by a team of attorneys from the respected California law firm of Halpern and Halpern, Steve Kubby filed suit against Placer County in Placer County Superior Court on June 18, seeking $250 million in damages and compensation. Mr. Kubby's lawsuit charges Placer officials violated the Americans With Disabilities Act, committed assault, battery, trespass and false imprisonment, deliberately inflicted emotional distress, and violated the medical marijuana law that Kubby helped pass in 1996. Here's hoping every one of these rabid, life-hating zealots is convicted, personally bankrupted, and given a lengthy sojourn in the gray-bar hotel.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. To receive his longer, better stuff, subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $72 to Privacy Alert, 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503 -- or dialing 775-348-8591.

Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

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Quotes

Government doesn't work. Never did. Never will. Can't. But there are lots of good people. Love them.

-- Bill St. Clair

The Atlanta Declaration

Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon -- rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.

-- L. Neil Smith

Reread that pesky first clause of the Second Amendment. It doesn't say what any of us thought it said. What it says is that infringing the right of the people to keep and bear arms is treason. What else do you call an act that endangers "the security of a free state"? And if it's treason, then it's punishable by death. I suggest due process, speedy trials, and public hangings.

-- L. Neil Smith

A Penalty Clause for the Bill of Rights

Any official, appointed or elected, at any level of government, who attempts, through legislative act or other means, to nullify, evade, or avoid the provisions of the first ten amendments to this Constitution, or of the Thirteenth Amendment, shall be summarily removed from office, and, upon conviction, deprived of all pay and benefits including pension, and sentenced to imprisonment for life.

-- L. Neil Smith

Based on 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and some of its own empirical work, the panel couldn't identify a single gun control regulation that reduced violent crime, suicide or accidents.

-- John Lott, commenting on the National Academy of Sciences report on gun control laws.

Who is a libertarian?

Zero Aggression Principle ("Zap")

"A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim."

-- L. Neil Smith

(Formerly called the "Non-Aggression Principle", or "NAP")

Why Did It Have to be... Guns?

Make no mistake: all politicians -- even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership -- hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it's an X-ray machine. It's a Vulcan mind-meld. It's the ultimate test to which any politician -- or political philosophy -- can be put.

If a politician isn't perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash -- for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn't your friend no matter what he tells you.

If he isn't genuinely enthusiastic about his average constituent stuffing that weapon into a purse or pocket or tucking it under a coat and walking home without asking anybody's permission, he's a four-flusher, no matter what he claims.

What his attitude -- toward your ownership and use of weapons -- conveys is his real attitude about you. And if he doesn't trust you, then why in the name of John Moses Browning should you trust him?

-- L. Neil Smith

Concise

"Tell me," I was once asked, "What do you think about gun control? Give me the short answer." To which I replied, "If you try to take our firearms we will kill you."

-- Mike Vanderboegh

Also from The Atlanta Declaration:

... like going to the bathroom, breathing, eating, sleeping, or making love, it turns out that self-defense is a bodily function one cannot safely or effectively delegate to a second party.

-- L. Neil Smith

This does not mean that "Marijuana should be available by prescription." It means that morphine sulfate should be available in five pound bags at the supermarket for a couple of bucks, like sugar... but probably in a different aisle, to avoid confusion.

-- Vin Suprynowicz

If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.

-- Edward Abbey

The state can only survive as long as a majority is programmed to believe that theft isn't wrong if it's called taxation or asset forfeiture or eminent domain, that assault and kidnapping isn't wrong if it's called arrest, that mass murder isn't wrong if it's called war.

-- Bill St. Clair

End the War on Freedom

Yes, we're at war ... against sick Americans