Bush lawyer likens power struggle over pot laws to civil rights standoffs

[Nambe]

SAN FRANCISCO (AP)

California and other states that want to make marijuana available to sick or dying patients are flouting federal drug laws in much the same way that Southern states defied national civil rights laws, a senior Bush administration lawyer said. --

``There is a basic question of what power does California have,'' said lawyer Gerald Uelman, Quinlivan's opponent in two cases. The federal law regulating drugs ``is not a federal takeover of the medical system'' or the duty of doctors to help the very ill, Uelman said.

Uelman and a California attorney general's office lawyer objected to the civil rights analogy and the notion that California is asserting the same kind of states' rights argument that Alabama used to try to avoid desegregating its schools.

When government agents shut down marijuana growers who serve sick people, it is ``not acting with the same degree of moral propriety as it did to end civil rights abuses,'' said Taylor Carey, a California special assistant attorney general who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief backing medical marijuana. ---