U.S. Considers ‘Deputizing’ Police for Marijuana Cases

WASHINGTON —  U.S. drug officials, still struggling to deal with California’s newly approved medicinal marijuana law, said Monday they are exploring ways to essentially deputize state and local officers to act as federal agents in seizing the drug and making arrests.

“Can state or local officials seize [marijuana] as contraband under federal law and turn it over to federal law enforcement? That’s the one we are looking most closely at,” said Thomas A. Constantine, administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “It remains to be seen.”

But White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey conceded at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that the administration is still “puzzling through” ways to get around Proposition 215, which legalizes the use of marijuana in California for medical purposes.

Since California approved the proposition Nov. 5, state and federal law enforcement officials--fearing soaring drug use as a result--have been trying to figure out how to circumvent Proposition 215 and use federal drug laws that prohibit the possession and sale of marijuana.

Washington’s pace in responding to the new law came under attack at the hearing. “The election was a month ago and the administration doesn’t have a plan,” complained John Walters, a deputy director at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Bush.

In particular, he scoffed at a repeated assertion by McCaffrey that the administration intends to collect data on the harm it predicts will come as a result of Proposition 215. “One thing they want to do is watch the body count in California,” said Walters. “Why don’t they prevent the body count in California?”

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The committee hearing was rife with denunciations of the initiative passed by 56% of the voters in California and an even broader measure approved in Arizona. McCaffrey, Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates and others decried the propositions as “a march toward drug legalization” and branded the well-financed campaigns to pass them a “cruel hoax.”

But specifics of what the administration plans to do about two state measures that run straight up against federal law were revealed only under questioning at the hearing.

Asked whether the Drug Enforcement Administration would step up efforts to prosecute marijuana possession in both states, administrator Constantine stopped short of promising any additional federal manpower.

But he said federal agencies are exploring how California and the federal government can work together.

In addition to exploring whether state or local officers can seize marijuana as federal contraband, he said officials are also investigating whether the officers could make an arrest on the federal government’s behalf. “At present, it appears they cannot,” he said, but indicated that the matter is not resolved.

“We are trying to solve 15 major agenda issues [concerning this] right now and are in such uncharted territory,” Constantine said. “ . . . Most Americans have not yet grasped the concept of what happened last month in California and Arizona.”

But constitutional law experts and an aide to California Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren said afterward in interviews that it is not at all unusual for local law enforcement agents to arrest a suspect for a federal violation.

“What if local police happened to arrest someone for robbing a bank--a federal crime?” said John Copacino, director of the Criminal Justice Clinic at Georgetown University. “They don’t say, ‘Geez, this is a violation of federal statutes.’ They take them over to the federal court, turn them over and prosecute them there.”

Cross-deputizing is common in California, agreed Lungren press secretary Steve Telliano. He said the question is not whether the strategy is legal, but whether it would work, considering an already burdened staff of federal prosecutors that would have to shoulder the extra caseload.

“It happens in California on an almost daily basis,” Telliano said. “But it could mean a tremendous increase in the workload at the U.S. attorney’s office.”

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At the hearing chaired by Republican Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, witnesses opposed to the initiative laid out a frightening possible scenario of school bus drivers smoking pot and marijuana crops growing in fields near schools.

But to California law enforcement leaders--already convinced of the initiative’s dangers--such rhetoric was clearly growing tiresome.

Behind the scenes, there was talk that state leaders expect little help in the end from the Clinton administration, an issue that will likely be discussed today in Sacramento when Lungren is scheduled to meet with district attorneys, sheriffs and police chiefs from around the state to sort out Proposition 215.

“We don’t expect a damn thing from the Clinton administration,” one Sacramento aide grumbled. “They want to stop this from happening in other states, but they look at California and Arizona as lost causes.”

A lone voice invited to testify at the hearing in defense of the ballot initiatives disputed claims that voters were duped by slick campaigns.

Marvin Cohen, an Arizona lawyer and treasurer of Arizonans for Drug Policy Reform, said voters in his state were simply acknowledging that the nation’s $13.2-billion-a-year war on drugs has failed.

“Voters knew exactly what they were doing on Nov. 5,” Cohen said. “Today, Americans are understandably pessimistic about this country’s drug war.”

But his testimony only seemed to raise the hackles of committee chairman Hatch, who said the ballot language was so confusing the voters “didn’t really have a chance to understand what the hell this was all about.”

Calling the propositions “a threat . . . to America,” the senator asked administration officials Constantine and McCaffrey to report back to the committee by the first of the year with a federal policy proposal.