‘Vindictive prosecution’

The owners of six Southern California medical marijuana dispensaries, including one store linked to an accident that killed a motorist and paralyzed an officer, are facing federal drug charges.

Virgil Grant III, 41, and his wife, Psytra Grant, 33, were arrested Tuesday, according to a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles.

The Grants, of the town of Carson, also face money laundering charges, which the federals routinely add to any such indictments the way an ice cream shop adds whipped cream and nuts.

So far, we have only the government's side of the case. It's tempting to say the defendants' side will come out in court, and then we'll know whether criminal activity really occurred. But in fact, whether these defendants will be allowed to present "the whole truth," to offer their best defense, now becomes the major question at hand.

Federal authorities, despite the 10th Amendment and the fact that the U.S. Constitution grants the central government no expressed power to regulate drugs or medicine, choose not to recognize the medical marijuana laws in California and 11 other states.

In 2003, the federal government put "Pot Guru" Ed Rosenthal of Oakland on trial for growing and selling thousands of marijuana plants -- and threatened to jail his lawyers if they attempted to tell the jury that Rosenthal had been licensed by the state of California and the city of Oakland to do exactly that.

Rosenthal was convicted, but spent only a single day in jail -- the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2006 threw out his conviction based on jury misconduct. Interestingly, at a pointless 2007 retrial where Rosenthal faced no additional jail time, prosecutors "added charges that he had laundered marijuana proceeds by buying four money orders totaling $1,854, and that he had falsified tax returns for 1999, 2000 and 2001 by omitting income from his marijuana distribution," The Oakland Tribune reported.

But U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer --brother of the Supreme Court justice -- tossed out those new charges, deeming them to be "vindictive prosecution," the Tribune reported.

Sounds like a pretty good description of this entire hopped-up campaign to stuff the genie of medical marijuana back into its bottle.

What next? Will federal revenuers go back to whacking at beer barrels with axes?