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By Peter Schrag  
Source: Sacramento Bee  

Calif. -- Almost anybody who's lived in California for even a few years knows from where that acrid smell in the air and the yellow haze in the sky have been coming. And we know the scary feeling that comes with them. The only exceptions are the narcs, state and federal, who think it's marijuana smoke.

As California's wildfires overwhelm the resources to fight them, federal and state agents – hundreds of them – have been sweeping through Humboldt County and a sliver of Mendocino County in pursuit of commercial pot growers.

There's good reason for that forbearance. The investigation of the pot growers, as in the past, was initiated by the California Justice Department's Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement and involved state drug agents as well as the California Highway Patrol, county sheriff's deputies, and local cops. Years ago, Attorney General – later governor – George Deukmejian, wearing a flak jacket, himself choppered in to lead one of the raids.

But ever since 1996, when voters passed Proposition 215, which authorizes the dispensation and use of marijuana for medical purposes, the raiders have to make distinctions between commercial pot and medical pot.

When the feds act alone, they don't have to bother with fine lines, or worry about whether the cancer, multiple sclerosis and glaucoma patients they bust or whose property they seize will now live with even more pain and difficulty negotiating their already tough lives. Federal law pre-empts state law, and federal law, still stuck in the absolutism of the G-man era, says pot is a terrible drug now and forever.

The link between the wildfires and the pot raids is more than symbolic. That's a no-brainer. If more resources were diverted from the drug wars to things that really endangered the community, firefighters would have gotten some of the help last week they were begging for.