The drugs were hidden in a secret compartment buried under ice and fish

The drugs were hidden in a secret compartment, buried under ice and fish.. The United States Supreme Court slammed the door shut yesterday on a growing movement to legalise the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, ruling that cannabis was an illegal drug and there could be no exceptions. The United States Supreme Court slammed the door shut yesterday on a growing movement to legalise the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, ruling that cannabis was an illegal drug and there could be no exceptions.
The unanimous judgment dashed the hopes of many people suffering from Aids, cancer, multiple sclerosis and other illnesses who have found marijuana the most effective form of pain relief.The immediate effect of the ruling is to prevent the Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Co-operative in California from resuming distribution. It had won the right to dispense marijuana to chronically ill patients in a statewide referendum in 1996.But in ruling that the federal classification of illegal drugs overrides any special provisions enacted by individual states, the court in effect ended the legal distribution of medicinal marijuana in other states as well.The written judgment said the case had raised questions about the ability of the federal government to enforce the country’s drug laws.”In this case,” it said, “we must decide whether there is a medical necessity exception to these prohibitions. We hold that there is not.”The California provision, now adopted in nine other states, allowed patients to receive marijuana on the recommendation of a doctor.

Yesterday’s ruling said that marijuana has “no currently accepted medical use”.The Supreme Court pronouncement was the culmination of a three-year battle between the American government and the Oakland co-operative in which the government presented the medicinal marijuana movement as a stalking-horse for the wider legalisation of cannabis, and then other drugs.After losing in the district court in 1998, the Oakland co- operative had won at appeal, with the judge accepting medical necessity as a legitimate reason for distributing marijuana. That ruling was comprehensively reversed yesterday.In Washington, Kevin Zeese, of the group Common Sense for Drug Policy, predicted that the federal government would have trouble enforcing the drug laws before juries.. The Federal Bureau of Investigation dropped its search for suspects who may have helped Timothy McVeigh bomb the Oklahoma City federal building less than a month after the attack, an internal FBI memo obtained by The Independent shows. The Federal Bureau of Investigation dropped its search for suspects who may have helped Timothy McVeigh bomb the Oklahoma City federal building less than a month after the attack, an internal FBI memo obtained by The Independent shows.Despite witness sightings of accomplices with McVeigh in Oklahoma City on the morning of the bombing in April 1995, and despite a nationwide hunt for a man the authorities called “John Doe 2″, the memo suggests that the search was quietly dropped, at least temporarily, in mid-May 1995.The memo is a report by a field officer in San Francisco, who tells his superiors he has made unsuccessful attempts to track down the landlord of a possible John Doe 2 ­ known in the bureau’s own investigative jargon as “Unsub (for “unidentified subject”) #2″.”In view of the fact that the Oklahoma Command Post has directed all offices to hold Unsub #2 leads in abeyance, San Francisco will conduct no further investigation regarding this lead,” the memo from Special Agent Thomas P Ravenelle reads. The exact day the memo was written is unknown, but it refers to an investigative lead taken up on 3 May 1995 and clearly abandoned shortly afterwards.Why the FBI would have dropped its interest in John Doe 2 so quickly is a mystery, but the decision is in keeping with the line eventually taken by government lawyers at the 1997 trials of McVeigh and his main known accomplice, Terry Nichols ­ that John Doe 2 did not, in fact, exist.The issue has returned to prominence after last week’s revelation that the FBI had withheld more than 3,000 pages of evidence from the defence at the McVeigh and Nichols trials.

The revelation prompted John Ashcroft, the Attorney General, to announce a 26-day delay in McVeigh’s execution, which had been due tomorrow.It is believed that the new documents contain witness statements on John Doe 2 and possibly other suspects. Defence lawyers have accused the US government of holding back evidence pointing to a wider conspiracy. Yesterday, Nichols’ lawyers said they had asked the Supreme Court to reopen his case.McVeigh’s execution has been put back to June 11, but many legal experts expect a much longer delay.. The Federal Bureau of Investigation came under increased pressure yesterday to explain its behaviour in the Oklahoma City bombing case as lawyers for Timothy McVeigh’s accomplice Terry Nichols, emboldened by the discovery of thousands of previously withheld pages of government evidence, petitioned the Supreme Court to reopen his case. The Federal Bureau of Investigation came under increased pressure yesterday to explain its behaviour in the Oklahoma City bombing case as lawyers for Timothy McVeigh’s accomplice Terry Nichols, emboldened by the discovery of thousands of previously withheld pages of government evidence, petitioned the Supreme Court to reopen his case.There were also calls from at least three senators for a presidential or congressional investigation into the bureau after a string of high-profile disasters.

What the Justice Department has tried to portray as an embarrassing but relatively minor glitch is showing signs of growing into a much bigger scandal, not only because of the light it sheds on the FBI’s behaviour but because of its potential to blow open the government prosecution of the Oklahoma bombing and its contention that McVeigh planted the bomb alone.Arlen Specter, a Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, warned in a television interview: “If we find deliberate concealment, that’s obstruction of justice, and people ought to go to jail.”The lawyers for Nichols, who was sentenced to life in 1997, said they had filed papers to the Supreme Court over the weekend renewing an appeal based on their contention that the government had failed to hand over a number of prosecution documents, as required by law. The earlier appeal was turned down by the Supreme Court on the grounds that any withheld papers were unlikely to alter the outcome of the trial.The picture looks very different now that the Justice Department has admitted holding on to more than 3,000 pages of evidence, an admission that has already forced John Ashcroft, the Attorney General, to postpone McVeigh’s execution for at least a month.It is believed the new documents, which have been handed to the McVeigh and Nichols defence teams, contain witness testimony about other suspects seen in Oklahoma City on the morning of the bombing. The government has insisted for the past four years that the accomplice initially presented to the world as John Doe 2 does not in fact exist, an assertion challenged by compelling evidence of a wider conspiracy presented by The Independent in a special report last Friday, before the FBI disclosed the existence of the new documents.The Justice Department says the new material came to light through an internal reorganisation of archive materials within the FBI. But there is some evidence to suggest the discovery was made because of public access requests under the Freedom of Information Act. Two private investigators ­ J D Cash, an Oklahoman journalist, and Roger Charles, a former Marines colonel ­ told The Independent yesterday they had filed about 40 such requests with the FBI and other federal agencies, the first last September and most of the rest in January.In addition to material on John Doe 2 and other possible bombing suspects who may have been seen by witnesses interviewed by the FBI, the two men have asked to see material relating to a white supremacist compound in eastern Oklahoma called Elohim City, which has long been suspected of having links to the bombing.