Quick Hits (page 5)
International Ecstasy Ring Raid
By: Henry K. Lee (SF Chronicle)
Three East Bay residents and a San Jose man were among more than 150 people arrested for their roles in an international ring that authorities said was responsible for smuggling 15 percent of the party drug ecstasy into the United States.
Thanh Tran, 47, of Newark; Dong Dang Huynh, 39, of Alameda; Huynh's sister, Thi Thao Thi Huynh, 33, of Newark; and Huy Tran, 24, of San Jose face charges of money laundering as a result of a two-year investigation that federal officials dubbed "Operation Candy Box."
Relatives of the four declined to comment about the early morning arrests conducted by FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration agents and other agencies.
The alleged ringleaders, Ze Wai Wong, 46, a Chinese citizen, and Thi Phuong Mai Le, 38, a Vietnamese citizen, oversaw a wide-ranging network of cells in 18 U.S. cities and Canada that distributed up to a million ecstasy tablets a month and laundered as much as $5 million per month, authorities said.
Wong, who was arrested in Toronto, oversaw ecstasy distribution, and Le, taken into custody in Ottawa, orchestrated the money laundering of the drug proceeds, authorities said. Both could face life in prison without parole if they are convicted on charges of operating a continuing criminal enterprise.
In a wiretapped phone conversation in August, Le was heard telling an associate to fly to Seattle to pick up proceeds from ecstasy sales and deliver the money to someone in Oakland, where the money would be transferred to bank accounts worldwide, including in Vietnam, according to an indictment unsealed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.
Investigators have shut down three ecstasy labs in Canada and seized 12 guns, $5.9 million and 500,000 tablets of ecstasy, which is considered the drug of choice by many of those who attend "raves," all-night parties featuring loud techno-beat music.
Users of ecstasy, a mind-altering stimulant chemically known as methylenedioxymethamphetamine or MDMA -- "E" on the streets -- report a heightened sense of well-being. But they can suffer from depression and memory loss, according to health officials.
"Out of all the dangers of illegal drugs, ecstasy is of special concern because it is aimed at our teens and youth masquerading as colorful candy," said Karen Tandy, DEA administrator.
The raids effectively dismantled the ring, said Deputy Attorney General James Comey. "Through the work of many different agencies, we have achieved a top-to-bottom decimation of a dangerous drug organization and a complementary attack on the fuel that drives the organization -- their money," Comey said.
Wong's clandestine ecstasy-making laboratories in Toronto provided tablets to distribution cells in Atlanta; Los Angeles; New York; Des Moines, Iowa; Houston; New Orleans; Orlando and Tennessee, authorities said. Distribution cells "then sold the ecstasy to users on the streets and in nightclubs," according to an indictment unsealed in U.S. District Court in New York.
From there, the group arranged for millions of dollars of drug proceeds to be collected and laundered back to leaders in Canada, authorities said.
Group members often communicated in code with prepaid cell phones, court papers said. Couriers used vehicles with hidden compartments to smuggle ecstasy and money, authorities said. In one case, police searched a vehicle bound for Canada via the border city of Burlington, Vt., and found $750,000 in the gas tank, investigators said.
The group was known to resort to violence, with one person getting killed with a meat cleaver in January in New York because of a drug debt, the indictment said.
The group also trafficked in Canadian-grown marijuana, known as "BC Bud," investigators said. Authorities also seized 1,170 pounds of marijuana and 6.5 pounds of methamphetamine during the investigation.
Growin' Our Own (page 5)
Woman has led Fight for Medical Marijuana to a new High
By: Martha Mendoza (AP)
Santa Cruz, Calif. - What do you do when you sue U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and win? Fifty-one-year-old Valerie Corral, a sinewy 5-foot tall great-granddaughter of Italian immigrants, throws back her head laughing, her hands reaching to the clouds, hips wiggling, feet stomping.
"It's my happy dance!" she says, throwing her arms around her husband Mike.
She has also planted an acre of marijuana.
The decision that lets the crop remain is just one round in a long legal battle.
In April, a federal judge in San Jose issued a preliminary injunction banning the Justice Department, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, from interfering with the Corrals' pot garden, set above an ocean bluff near Davenport, about an hour south of San Francisco. The injunction gives the judge time to reconsider his earlier decision to allow the garden to be uprooted. Still, the Corrals call the injunction a victory.
They share their harvest through the first legally recognized, nonprofit medical marijuana club in America, which they founded in 1993. The club has about 250 seriously ill members who have prescriptions from their doctors to use marijuana to alleviate their suffering, increase their appetites and control their seizures. The marijuana is free.
The San Jose ruling is one of a number challenging federal restrictions on medical marijuana, which has consistently won support in national opinion polls since 1995 but has had a mixed record in state ballot measures.
This summer, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide whether to hear another case that could undo or affirm the Corrals' right to grow pot - granted by state and local regulations, but denied by federal law. A second case in federal court in San Francisco - in which other medicinal-use growers seek to reclaim seized marijuana - could also affect the couple.
The Justice Department refused comment.
For now, the Corrals are the only people in the United States growing marijuana in their backyard backed by state law, a local ordinance and a federal judge's injunction. And Valerie Corral has become a heroine to proponents of medical marijuana.
"This could be the moment of the beginning of the end of this insane war against the sick," said Bruce Mirken of the Washington D.C.-based advocacy group Marijuana Policy Project. "And while the DEA and the Justice Department characterize Valerie as a common drug dealer, all you have to do is spend two minutes with her to know that's a lie."
During the past three decades, while sharing marijuana with sick people, Corral has watched - and in many cases held - 140 friends, ranging in age from 7 to 96, as they died of cancer, AIDS and other illnesses.
"It is the greatest honor to be asked by a person who is dying to sit with them," she said.
Reflection on those deaths has given her strength, she said - while battling the government, when federal agents pointed a rifle at her head, and when her motives have been called into question.
"John Ashcroft is not someone I would have chosen to tangle with,but I think of him, and George Bush, as lost souls," she said. "When I look at them, I think about how they are just people, ... and that makes them less fearsome. Ultimately we all make the same journey, and ultimately I hope they make theirs in peace."
In fact, Corral's compassion is grudgingly respected at the DEA's San Francisco office.
"I'm personally impressed with her desire to help deathly ill people," said spokesman Richard Meyer. "It's just that she makes it look like the way to help sick and dying people is to give them marijuana. And that's not the case.
"There's hundreds of ways to help these people. The DEA has a lot of compassion for those people who are sick and dying, but I think there are many, many ways to help them without giving them marijuana."
At DEA headquarters, authorities said the issue has nothing to do with Valerie Corral or compassion.
"This may be personal to her, but it's not personal to the DEA," said the agency's Will Glaspy in Washington, D.C. "The DEA's job is to enforce the Controlled Substance Act. Congress passed the laws and charged us with enforcing them. She is attempting to use the court system to get what she wants."
Valerie Corral's path to becoming a medical marijuana advocate began 31 years ago, the day a small airplane swooped low and buzzed a Volkswagen she was riding in through the Nevada desert. The car went out of control and was sent skidding, rolling and bouncing 365 feet through the dust, brush and rocks.
Corral's slight body was flung against the roof and doors, causing brain damage, epilepsy, and a lifetime of staggering migraines. She took prescription drugs but still suffered convulsions, shaking and grand mal seizures.
Then one day, Mike handed her a medical journal article that showed marijuana controlled seizures in mice. Since then, for 30 years, Valerie Corral says she has maintained a steady level of marijuana in her system.
Her legal challenges began in 1992, when the local sheriff arrested her for growing five marijuana plants. With Mike, she challenged the law, using the defense of necessity.
Prosecutors dismissed the case, saying they didn't think they could win before a sympathetic jury in liberal Santa Cruz. When the sheriff arrested the Corrals again in 1993, the district attorney said he had no intention of ever prosecuting them and told police to leave them alone.
A few years later, the Corrals helped draft California's landmark Compassionate Use Act, approved by voters in 1996, that allows patients with a doctor's recommendation to use marijuana. Similar laws in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon and Washington allow the infirm to receive, possess, grow or smoke marijuana for medical purposes without fear of state prosecution.
But the law did not provide complete protection from arrest.
While local authorities worked with the Corrals to protect them against theft and coordinate distribution, federal agents continued to assert that growing, using and distributing marijuana was illegal. To provide legal protection, the city of Santa Cruz deputized the Corrals in 2000 to function as medical marijuana providers.
But in September 2002, federal agents raided the Corrals' farm - just weeks before their annual harvest - taking the couple to jail and pulling up more than 150 plants.
The Corrals were never charged, but the raid prompted them to begin a legal challenge to the federal ban, aided by a team of attorneys including University of Santa Clara law professor Gerald Uelmen and advocates at the Drug Policy Alliance, a non-profit Washington D.C.-based organization.
This is the case in which the San Jose judge recently ruled in their favor.
"Representing Valerie Corral, for me, is like representing Mother Teresa," said Uelmen, a constitutional law expert, calling her "one of the most compassionate people I've ever met."
And one who has led a movement to a new high.
Pipeline (page 5)
Time to cut Through the Legal Haze of Marijuana
By: Eurekea Times-Standard editorial
There has been a lot of debate about medical marijuana laws -- most of it revolving around how much should be allowed for consumption, distribution and production for medical purposes.
The arguments range from the federal position of zero tolerance to liberal cries of make it all legal.
The questions are far more complex than how much or little or none at all. And it is encouraging to observe efforts being made to understand the ramifications of medical marijuana in schools and the workplace.
A panel hosted by the Humboldt County [California] Workplace Investment Board recently addressed issues concerning marijuana in the workplace.
Jon Sapper, a WIB member and assistant superintendent of Humboldt County Schools, said, "Quite a few questions were raised, especially in areas that will probably have to be decided in the courts because there's no clarity in the law to answer those questions."
Clarity would indeed seem to be in short supply.
There is the conflict between the feds and the states, counties and cities. A county may pass its regulations, but how does that affect federal employees working within the county? What effect does a drug-free school zone have on a student who has a 215 card for medical marijuana?
The Americans with Disabilities Act outlines the requirements about employing people with disabilities. How would that affect an employee who shows up high on medical marijuana? Can that employee be turned away or prevented from operating a forklift? It can also be argued that medical marijuana really is for those who are too critically ill to work.
What's the difference between an employee who takes a prescription pain killer that warns against operating certain equipment or driving while taking the medication and a person who takes medical marijuana?
All prescription drugs go through a rigorous screening at the Food and Drug Administration before they can be marketed. The analysis determines how the drug should be used, how it is retained in the body, how it reacts with other drugs, what effects it has on pregnant or nursing women. Since marijuana has not undergone this scrutiny, what is known about its effects?
The federal government does not recognize marijuana as a medicine, putting it, instead, into the Schedule I category with heroin and LSD, more restrictive than Schedule II, which includes morphine and cocaine.
The primary ingredient of marijuana, delta-9-tetrhydrocannabinol (THC), is available for prescription as Marinol, which has been approved by the FDA for AIDS patients and those undergoing cancer chemotherapy.
Humboldt State University Police Chief Robert Foster wrote recently in an editorial-page item in the Times-Standard: "It's important to know that local ordinances and state medicinal marijuana laws do not apply on school property, including colleges and universities. On campus, you will be arrested for either possession or trafficking."
Robert Bonner, former administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said in a paper published in 1995: "Those who insist that marijuana has medical uses would serve society better by promoting or sponsoring more legitimate research," rather than promoting additional legislation.
We agree with this approach. It has been proven that marijuana has medicinal uses. The issue that is frequently missed is that there is no standardized source of marijuana for commercial medicinal purposes. More energy should be spent discovering just how much good can come from the plant and treat it the same as a prescription drug.
Continuing on the course of countervailing, superseding, overlapping and just plain confusing laws does more harm than good and impedes legitimate research on a drug that could have tremendous benefits for mankind.
Medical marijuana convictions appeals assistance in California. Recorded medical conditions only, with or without a doctor's recommendation. For details contact William McPike.
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