TOWER
- - Ever since the May 22 California State Police raid on the Cannabis
Buyers Club effectively shut down the public distribution of
marijuana for medical use in San Francisco, activists favoring legalizing
the use of marijuana as medicine have adopted a legislative agenda.
California voters by an 80% margin approved
Proposition 215, a referendum legalizing the use of marijuana
with a doctor's prescription, as well as cultivation of the marijuana
plant for purposes of filling such a prescription.
From 1992 until the raid in May of 1998,
the Cannabis Buyers Club ran a distribution center out of
three stories of a loft building on San Francisco's Market Street
where thousands of persons with medical prescriptions were supplied
with pot for a wide variety of ailments, ranging fro nausea brought
about by AIDS and chemotherapy to glaucoma, Crohn's disease, and
amytrophic lateral sclerosis.
Though the club was left alone for years
by San Francisco authorities, on May 22, state cops, acting on the
authorization of California Attorney General Dan Lundgren, raided
the club, seized pot and patient records and later made several
arrests.
Since then, clandestine buyers clubs have
continued to supply pot to persons with physicians' recommendations,
but these are a far cry from the Cannabis Buyers Club wide
open operation at 1444 Market Street, which sold hash oil, brownies,
marijuana candy, and several different grades of the weed, to be
taken home or eaten or smoked on the premises in a wholesome atmosphere
where a whole floor was reserved for non tobacco smokers.
The new underground clubs are more or less
tolerated by the San Francisco police under the administration of
Mayor Willie Brown and liberal District Attorney Terrence Hallinan,
but as marijuana rights activist John Entwhistle told reporters:
"We don't want to be tolerated. We want to be legal."
Entwhistle is a co-author of Proposition
215 and a spokesperson for California Compassionate Use,
an organization advocating the legal use of marijuana in medicine.
Entwhistle's primary work has been in the legal cultivation of pot
at a farm in Lake County in Northern California, where the 9-foot
pot plants benefit from rich volcanic soil.
Entwhistle told reporters that although
the Cannabis Buyers Club was closed under provisions of California
law outlawing sales or distribution of marijuana, the cultivation
of pot for medical purposes is clearly legal under the terms of
Proposition 215. Although marijuana cultivation is prohibited
under Federal Law, there has been little effort on the part of the
DEA or the Justice Department to interfere with the activities at
the farm. "We turn ourselves in to the DEA before every harvest,"
said Entwhistle, describing the game of cat and mouse in which the
staff of the farm inform the feds each year of the legality, under
California law, of what they are doing.
Entwhistle spoke of the two-pronged strategy
for legalizing medical marijuana on a California-wide level and
on a Federal level -- a struggle which has often led "compassionate
use" activists in contradictory directions.
In California, the focus has been on inserting
a medical exception into Article 11360 of the California penal code,
which criminalizes the sale of marijuana. Although Proposition
215 clearly legalizes the use of pot with a doctor's recommendation,
not necessarily even a formal prescription, and makes cultivation
for distribution to patients with such recommendation legal, Article
11360 prohibits all marijuana sales. According to Entwhistle,
advocates for the medical use of pot will "go to Sacramento
this December and January when the laws are being written and carry
the issue of changing the law on sale right to the governor's desk."
Activists are counting on the election
of Gray Davis(D) as governor, who is running against none other
than Attorney General Dan Lundren, Republican arch conservative
in the Reagan mold and nemesis of the Cannabis Buyers Club.
In a recent debate, Lundgren accused Davis of not being a "real
supporter of the death penalty." Anxious to re-establish his
law and order credentials, the Democrat responded that California
needed to be made "more like Singapore."
When asked whether Davis' reference
to the hard-line Asian nation was inauspicious for those counting
on him to support the effort to legalize medical marijuana, Entwhistle
recalled California's love- hate relationship with law enforcement.
"Don't listen to Gray Davis.
Nobody remembers what he says or does.
That's why they call him `Gray.' If it's him or Dan Lundgren, the
choice is obvious. He has a career of doing very little in politics
and if the bill got as far as him, he'd sign it." As of mid-September,
Davis had a twelve-point lead over Lundgren in the polls.
A different front on which the fight for
medical marijuana is being fought is on the Federal level, where
the battlefield is more administrative than legislative. Quietly,
and in the absence of overt attempts by the Justice Department to
interfere, the move is on to "re-schedule" marijuana from
a Schedule One drug, the most serious category which pot
presently shares with heroin, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms,
and other drugs that are considered to have no medical use and production
of which are prohibited, to a Schedule Two drug.
Schedule Two drugs, like Valium
and Prozac, are federally regulated, but may be administered
by a physician legally and consequently can be manufactured by pharmaceutical
companies possessing a license. "With a prescription you'd
be able to buy pot at Walgreens, but you could still go to jail
for growing it yourself," Entwhistle told reporters, apparently
favoring the Proposition 215 approach of legalizing cultivation.
"If you made Vitamin C Schedule 2, you'd have a scurvy
epidemic because of all the details. Chemotherapy
patients might need an eighth of an ounce a day to keep their appetites
up, and the only way people of modest means could afford this would
be to grow it themselves." The DEA has dropped opposition
to rescheduling pot, and the FDA will have to agree before this
could happen.
"We are not going to have another
Cannabis Buyers Club where pot is openly sold because we
have to maintain our identity as not selling pot for the time being,"
Entwhistle told reporters.
Asked about the approach now being taken
in Oakland where the City Council, under the administration of newly-elected
Mayor (and former California Governor) Jerry Brown, has unanimously
voted to make officials of the Cannabis Buyers Club officers
of the City, like executives of the Motor Vehicle Bureau,
thereby officially challenging California Attorney General Lundgren
to come into direct conflict with the local government if he tries
to shut down the sale of medical marijuana, Entwhistle said: "It's
good, but as long as the state law doesn't change, it [Oakland's
policy] gives one group of people a monopoly."
Entwhistle described the difficulty in
getting medical marijuana legalized in terms of the newness of the
issue and the rate at which information flows. "People understand
about the effects of chemotherapy and glaucoma, but they
haven't heard about the other developments in the application of
marijuana -- in Crohn's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease, and
alcoholism." He cogently summed up the reason for stressing
medical marijuana over the legalization of marijuana for recreational
and personal use: "The Netherlands has a tradition of tolerance
because they've been turned off to authoritarian solutions. They
recognize Nazism for what
it is.
There, marijuana is illegal, but tolerated.
Here, things have to be legal or illegal. You can have tolerance
one day, and the next day the government will come down on you.
The only chance we have for legalization, right now, is with medical
marijuana."
Dennis Peron, another author of Proposition
215 and one of those still facing charges of selling pot after
the closing of the Cannabis Buyers Club, quoted Ho Chi Minh:
"You pull back when your enemy is strong, and fight again another
day." Looking forward to the demise of Dan Lundgren's reign
in Sacramento, he predicted "In the end, democracy will prevail."
