County Sheriff Lee Baca and District Attorney Steve Cooley said at a news conference that the law would be unenforceable because it is trumped by federal laws that prohibit marijuana cultivation and possession.
"We will continue as we are today regardless of whether it passes or doesn't pass," Baca said. His deputies don't and won't go after users in their homes, but public use of the drug will be targeted, he said.
Both gubernatorial candidates - Democrat Jerry Brown and Republican Meg Whitman - oppose Prop 19 and declined comment Friday.
The ex-Drug Enforcement Administration chiefs sent a letter to Holder in August calling on the Obama administration to sue California if Prop 19 passes.
If California prevents police from enforcing the stricter federal ban on marijuana, the Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government cannot order local law enforcement to act, he said.
It "is a very tough-sounding statement that the attorney general has issued, but it's more bark than bite," said Robert Mikos, a Vanderbilt University law professor who studies the conflicts between state and federal marijuana laws.
"The same factors that limited the federal government's influence over medical marijuana would probably have an even bigger influence over its impact on recreational marijuana," Mikos said, citing not enough agents to focus on small-time violators.
Federal drug agents have long concentrated on big-time drug traffickers and left street-level dealers and users to local and state law enforcement. As police departments began enforcing California's medical marijuana law, the DEA only sporadically jumped in to bust medical users and sellers that local law enforcement was no longer targeting.
Allen Hopper, a drug law reform expert at the American Civil Liberties Union in Northern California, predicted that federal agents would selectively crack down on marijuana growers and merchants instead of going after every Californian who uses pot.
"They don't have the resources to flood the state with DEA agents to be drug cops," he said.
Nearly all arrests for marijuana crimes are made at the state level. Of more than 847,000 marijuana-related arrests nationwide in 2008, for example, just over 6,300 suspects were booked by federal law enforcement, or fewer than 1 percent.
Consequently, the fight over legalization may end up the same way medical marijuana did, experts said.
When Californians approved their first-in-the-nation medical marijuana law in 1996, Clinton administration officials vowed a harsh crackdown. But nearly 15 years later, California's billion-dollar medical marijuana industry is thriving.
During the Bush administration, retail pot dispensaries across the state faced regular raids from federal anti-drug agents. Their owners were sometimes sentenced to decades in prison for drug trafficking. Yet the medical marijuana industry still grew.
Besides California, 13 other states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana in recent years.
At the San Francisco Medical Cannabis Club, where you can buy marijuana-filled carrot cake and lollipops, manager James Kyne said the federal government would just be continuing "an endless cycle" with little positive effect.
Holder "is opening a bigger can of worms," Kyne said.
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Associated Press writers Pete Yost in Washington, Terry Collins and Lisa Leff in San Francisco, Samantha Young in Sacramento and Robert Jablon in Monterey Park, Calif., contributed to this report.
Author: MARCUS WOHLSEN - Source: washinghtonpost.com
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