ATTORNEY GENERAL MOONBEAM

Jerry Brown has been California's Attorney General since 2007. He was that state's governor from 1975-1983. In 1978, the late Mike Royko, then a Chicago Sun Times columnist, nicknamed Brown "Governor Moonbeam" for proposing the establishment of a California space academy. The nickname stuck with people all over the country who saw Brown's life-style and politics as eccentric.

Brown is an ardent opponent of the death penalty. As governor he took every opportunity to appoint judges who had openly expressed their opposition to capital punishment. His most notorious anti-death penalty appointment was that of Rose Bird in 1977 as chief justice of the California State Supreme Court. He also appointed avowed death penalty opponents Cruz Reynoso and Joseph Grodin to the state's highest court. During her 10 years as chief justice, Bird overturned every one of the 61 capital cases that came before the court on appeal. Finally the public got fed up and, in a 1986 retention election, removed Bird, Reynoso and Grodin from the bench.

Now Brown has weighed in on the 2007 drug overdose death in Florida of former Playboy playmate Anna Nicole Smith. He announced that Anna Nicole's former lawyer and boyfriend, Howard Stern, and two Los Angeles area doctors, Khristine Eroshevich, a psychiatrist, and Sandeep Kapoor have been charged with a number of felonies.

Stern and Kapoor were charged with one count of unlawfully prescribing a controlled substance. Eroshevich and Stern were charged with unlawfully prescribing a controlled substance between June 2004 and January 2007. Kapoor and Eroshevich were each charged with obtaining a prescription for opiates by "fraud, deceit or misrepresentation." They were both also charged with one count of obtaining a prescription for opiates by giving a false name or address. Kapoor and Stern were also charged with one count of "prescribing, administering or dispensing a controlled substance to an addict." Eroshevich was charged with the same crime for separate prescriptions.

Brown announced, "These individuals repeatedly and excessively furnished thousands of prescription pills to Anna Nicole Smith, often for no legitimate medical purpose." The charges were filed in Los Angeles County where prosecutors said that during a three year period, the doctors gave opiates, benzodiazapines and other drugs to Stern, who then gave them to Anna Nicole.

I don't have a problem with the charges being filed, but I do not understand why the authorities waited two years after Anna Nicole's death in Florida before filing them. Investigations of doctors for dispensing drugs illegally are quite simple and can usually be wrapped up in a few weeks. Could the late timing have anything to do with Brown's announced intention of running for governor again next year?

It is said that charges were filed against Eroshevich and Kapoor as a mesage to all doctors that prescribing drugs for no legitimate medical purpose will no longer be tolerated. "People in white smocks in pharmacies and with their medical degrees are a growing threat," Brown said. So, when will Attorney General Moonbeam and local California prosecutors start filing charges against all those doctors who are prescribing medical marijuana for the questionable and outright phony symptoms described by their potted patients?