Term limits likely to be voters' response to pot lawsuit

By: JIM TRAGESER - Staff Writer | Wednesday, January 25, 2006 7:18 PM PST ∞

The county Board of Supervisors declared war on the voters; now the voters are firing back, and the five individual supervisors are unlikely to enjoy the ultimate outcome.

Directing county staff to file a lawsuit seeking to overturn the voter-approved medical marijuana law was an act of political warfare: The same voters who put Bill Horn, Pam Slater-Price, Dianne Jacob, Greg Cox and Ron Roberts into office also approved Prop. 215 a decade ago.

The responses to the county's lawsuit have ranged from the banally predictable (the ACLU is threatening to ... yawn ... take legal action of its own) to the truly imaginative ---- particularly an announcement last week that a petition is being circulated to put a ballot measure before voters that would institute term limits for the Board of Supervisors.

Given that voters have rarely met a term limits measure they didn't like, it makes you wonder why the supervisors would have taken such a confrontational position, one so very likely to provoke voters into action.

Further confounding things is the question of why the supervisors would pick such an inconsequential issue on which to take such a risky stand. Marijuana is hardly some deadly scourge threatening our community. Nobody's ever died of a marijuana overdose, nor does smoking pot turn its users into maniacally violent sociopaths. The health risks of smoking pot are long-term and accumulative, much as those associated with alcohol and tobacco.

So why the outrage on the part of the Board of Supervisors toward medical marijuana? Why the push to try to overrule the voters?

Look, I don't know if marijuana really has medicinal benefits or not ---- there doesn't seem to be much, if any, in the way of legitimate medical research into the effects of marijuana on various symptoms. Most of the arguments put forth in favor of it are anecdotal: "My poor, dying father found that smoking pot was the only way to ease the pain of ..." While not long in the scientific department, these arguments have the political advantage of being virtually unassailable. How do you counter that without coming off as a cold-hearted monster?

So those of us with doubts about the medicinal benefits of marijuana find it easier to keep them to ourselves ---- particularly as there isn't any real evidence that it doesn't work, either.

Still, with alcohol and tobacco both being just as dangerous as pot, it's pretty tough to figure out the Board of Supervisors' angle on all this. We have kids dying from heroin, ecstasy and crack ---- and our county leaders are worried about pot?

It would be easy to dismiss this whole thing as a cheap bit of political theater, nothing more than grandstanding ---- but that unavoidably brings us right back to the least explicable part of this morass:

Who are the supervisors trying to impress with their attack against the voters?

We may never know ---- for the voters are unlikely to wait for that explanation before sending the supervisors packing courtesy of term limits.

Contact staff writer Jim Trageser at (760) 740-5424 or jtrageser@nctimes.com.

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