Despite a 1996 resolution that legalized marijuana for medical use in California, California’s Attorney General Dan Lungren is pushing to shut down California’s cannabis clubs organizations through which sufferers of painful diseases such as AIDS and cancer obtain marijuana.

In response, a number of local political leaders, including the mayors of San Francisco, Oakland and Santa Cruz, wrote President Clinton, asking him to suspend enforcement of certain federal drug laws that interfere with the clubs’ operations and prevent Lungren from shutting them down.

Are they crazy? Isn’t marijuana dangerous? Most of those who support the decriminalization of marijuana medically or generally are probably a bunch of pot heads hoping to get high legally, right? It is for their own good that we make drugs hard to obtain and punish those who market in them.

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But what about the good of the 11,000 Californians who suffer from constant, devastating pain? If the clubs are shut down, will they stop taking marijuana for their pain? Would you? Of course not you would get it on the street. As California mayors pointed out, This will not only endanger patients’ lives, but place an unnecessary burden on our local police departments.

Here is a perfect example of how laws made for our own good not because an individual is harming someone wind up doing more harm than good. America has waged its war on marijuana and other drugs for decades. It has failed, and so we escalate it, depriving patients of their medication on the principle that somehow, drugs are the heart of all evil.

Many Americans believe illicit drugs must be wiped off the face of the Earth at any cost, even if it means forcing some people to live in pain, or granting police the authority to seize your cash and your car if you are caught with any amount of marijuana. In Louisiana, your vehicle can be seized on mere suspicion without requiring a warrant, conviction, or proof of possession. This law allowed a woman who was carrying a large cash donation to a church convention to be robbed of that cash and her car by the police, strip searched and jailed overnight on the suspicion that she was a drug dealer because of the amount of cash in her possession.

There is no good solution to America’s drug problem.

Two choices are left to us:more drug laws that grant police Gestapo-like powers and make smoking a joint as extreme a crime as murder; or decriminalization, which might lead to an increase in drug use, but would remove gangs’ ability to finance themselves as well as the main motivation for gang wars sales territory. A decrease in crime and gang activity would enable us to focus more on education and urban improvement.

However, many feel decriminalization is too extreme. But should we refuse to allow marijuana to be used even for medical purposes? How can we force tens of thousands of patients to live in torturous pain merely on the principle that their medicine is others’ poison?