Marijuana clubs still like outlaws (Tribune)

State's pot clubs still viewed by many as outlaws (CoCoTimes)

by John Hendren

ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN FRANCISCO The strains of sitar musl~ rnin~ie with the smoke at the
Cannabis Cultivitors Club, a '60sstyle bistro where the menu lis~ eight
grades of "top quality" marijuana.

A glass counter displays the best sellers: marijuanafilled brownies and
peanut butter cookies; "merry pills"; and rum bottles and glossy red

andgreen boxes bearing the club's Phoenix and Amigo brands.

"We call it the pharmaceutical nightclub," said Tracy Williams, 30, who
is paralyzed and often travels nearly 60 miles from his Santa Cruz home
for the drug be smokes to ease his muscle spasms.

Since California legalized medical marijuana in November, the state's
marijuana clubs have evolved from black market drug dens to bona fide'
cannabis retailers. They pay taxes, take bank cards and register
patients.

But the state's illdefined medical marijuana statute still makes
outlaws of buyers clubs. And the patients who come in wheelchairs or on
canes and often bear the purplish lesions thai mark AIDS sufferers risk
arrest daily in the' effort to ease their pain.

"I've known two people who have been busted in the last few weeks," said
San Franciscan Jay Segal, 48, who smokes marunana to relieve side effects
of AIDS drugs. "The funny thing is that the rightwingers all say
marijuana leads to crime. Look around you a lot of stoners lying on
couches. This is crime?"

At least a dozen clubs have opened in California, including sites in Los
Angeles, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, San Jose, Hayward, Marin and seven
locations in San Francisco.

But the law's silence on key legal questions has led to widely varying
enforcement from city to city, arrests of patients, federal agents
threatening doctors, black market deals between growers and buyers clubs
and the federal raid of a San Francisco club.

The November citizen referendum, Proposition 215, legalized marijuana
possession by anyone with a doctor's recommendation. But transporting it
even to the user's home remains illegal.

Authorities are grappling with such unanswered questions as whether
smoking in clubs violates state antismoking statutes, whether
cultivating the drug off club grounds remains a felony and whether sales
between grower and club are illegal.

Even clubs that adhere to a conservative interpretation of the law by
growing their supplies on the spot break the law by buying blackmarket
seeds, according to state and federal authorities.

"Prop 215 is a mess," said Karyn Sinunu, assistant district attorney in
charge of the Santa Clara County narcotics unit. "1 don't know if the
voters thought this stuff would fall from heaven or what, but that just
wasn't addressed before this thing was passed."

Helen, 79, who asked that her last name not be used, risks a prison term
each time she carries a bag of lowgrade marijuana on the twohour drive
from the San Francisco club to her home in Sacramento. The maruuana
cookies she bakes allow her 79yearold husband, Norman, to sleep
through the pain of a condition that leaves nerves exposed.

"I don't care what the federal government says, it has helped this
man.

Federal law, unlike California law, finds no medicinal value
in marijuana. Federal drug agents seized 331 plants at San Francisco's
Flower Therapy club April 21 in what San Francisco District Attorney
Terence Halinan called a "befuddling" raid of a legitimate business.

Prosecutors in each region are making up the law as they go along,
creating policies in one city that are often forbidden in the next.

In San Francisco, nearly everything goes. In San jose, one of the city's
two new pharmacylike buyers clubs was closed under a zoning law that
imposes similar limits on the location of adult bookstores. Prosecutors
say state smoking law bans smoking at the remaining site. And suppliers
face felony drug charges because Santa Clara County considers
transportation of marijuana illegal.

Of the 1,100member Oakland Cannabis Buyer's club, proprietor Jeff Jones
acknowledges working with the underground suppliers but keeps a law
profile.

The is no sign at the site, which sells two to five pounds of cannabis
each week, only a buzzer labeled "Oakland CBC" in a doorway wedged
between a travel service and an employment office. Patients present photo
membership cards at a line up at a pharmacystyle counter for their daily
limit of onequarter ounce.