Medicalmarijuana club sprouts up in San Diego

By Susan Duerksen
STAFF WRITER

Four times a day, when he can afford it, Jim smokes his medicine.

Before each meal and at bedtime, he fills the dimesized bowl of a
stubby wooden pipe, flicks a lighter and inhales.

As a result, he says, he's sleeping better, has gained 30 pounds and is
afraid to have his real name in the paper.

California voters last year legalized Jim's use of marijuana, but the
federal government still calls it a crime.

Jim, who has AIDS, is among nine people concerned with an assortment of
illnesses who have joined a new marijuanabuying club in San Diego. The
others include a woman with Tourette's syndrome and migraines, another
with fibromyalgia, a man with chronic pain from multiple broken bones
and a couple whose son has asthma.

They are hoping the club will provide them with highquality marijuana
and some measure of legitimacy should narcotics agents come knocking.

"The club enhances my legal position," said Debbie, a 45yearold
anthropology instructor and doctoral student. "I'm so sick of feeling
like a criminal to get my medicine."

Debbie says marijuana is the only drug she has found that eases the
painful muscle spasms of fibromyalgia without knocking her out.

Since the passage of Proposition 215 in November legalized the use of
marijuana in California for a variety of medical conditions, buying
clubs have proliferated around the state, especially in the San
Francisco Bay Area. But the clubs are only questionably legal under the
new state law and outright felonious under federal law, so their
existence depends largely on the attitude of local authorities.

In San Diego, cooperative buying of marijuana has been slow to catch on.
Membership recruitment for the San Diego Cannabis Caregivers Club is
crawling uphill, battling San Diego's conservative political atmosphere,
the club's dubious legal standing, marijuana's cost and conflicting
reports on its medical value.

The club owes its existence to 27yearold marijuana activist Dion
Markgraaff, who is not ill but moved back to San Diego from Amsterdam,
Netherlands, because of the opportunity presented by Proposition 215.
Since he started the club in January, he has signed on nine members and
said he is talking to four other potential members.

Juliana Humphrey, the public defender who represented La Mesa HIV
patient Sam Skipper when he was tried and acquitted in 1993 for growing
and using marijuana, said she's not surprised that San Diego's buying
club is struggling to thrive.

"I think it's riskier to do it in San Diego than San Francisco," she
said. "This is a tough county. Because this is a border town there are
lots of federally funded interagency drug programs . . . all tripping
over each other to make drug arrests."

In addition, District Attorney Paul Pfingst and local law enforcement
officials have been noncommittal, unlike their San Francisco
counterparts who have stated policies of tolerating medical use of
marijuana.

The San Diego Police Department is developing its policy, said Capt.
Cheryl Meyers, who heads the narcotics unit. For now, she said, police
will continue to arrest anyone caught with marijuana "unless an officer
really has evidence that they're ill, frail and the amount is consistent
with personal use."

"If there's any doubt, the officer will make the arrest," Meyers said.

No federal change

While Proposition 215 changed state law, it doesn't affect federal law
at all, said Heidi Landgraf, spokeswoman for the federal Drug
Enforcement Administration's San Diego branch.

"We are still going to uphold the federal narcotics laws and do what we
have to do," Landgraf said.

She would not comment on whether the agency might target the local
buying club but said, "Our goals are still to arrest the highest level
of traffickers."

The DEA seized equipment and plants in a raid on a San Francisco buying
club called Flower Therapy last month but didn't arrest anyone.

The government also has cowed physicians, who are on a hot seat because
Proposition 215 defines those entitled to use marijuana as anyone whose
doctor recommends it. After threats of federal punishment if doctors do
so, a federal judge in San Francisco issued an injunction last week
protecting doctors who recommend marijuana for specific diseases, as
long as they do nothing to help the patients obtain the drug.

Given that provision, the California Medical Association is advising
doctors not to put their recommendations in writing and certainly not to
talk with any buying club, said Dr. Jane Marmor, a Redwood City
oncologist who heads the CMA's advisory committee on medical marijuana.

"I don't think I would advise anyone to write anything down," she said.
"We believe physicians can have a full and open discussion (with
patients) of the pros and cons of marijuana and recommend it verbally if
they think it's warranted."

The San Diego Medical Society also advises physicians not to write a
marijuana prescription but to have careful discussions with patients who
ask about it. The Medical Society president, Dr. David Priver, said that
marijuana's usefulness has not been sufficiently proved but that
anecdotal evidence is strong enough that doctors can be justified in
recommending it in some cases.

"There are some patients who claim to have benefited quite dramatically
from this," Priver said. "We certainly sympathize with the plight of the
people who get nausea on these anticancer drugs. You'd hate to make it
impossible for them to get help."

But without written prescriptions buying clubs are hardpressed to prove
that their members have physicians' recommendations. Like the more
established clubs, the San Diego group asks members to provide copies of
medical records documenting their diagnoses and any conversations with
their doctors about marijuana.

Few allies

Besides all the legal turmoil, the San Diego club's recruiting strategy
may have contributed to its low membership. The club has shared booths
with a group advocating use of hemp fibers at Earth Day and other
events, yielding no new members. Markgraaff is just beginning to contact
local support groups for people with AIDS, cancer and other diseases.

And leaders of some of those groups say many patients are increasingly
unsure that marijuana is any better at what it does than other drugs
which are legally available and covered by insurance.

There are "so many improvements in the nausea medications now that it's
not as big an issue" as a few years ago, said Margaret Stauffer,
executive director of the Wellness Community, a support organization for
cancer patients.

Relieving the nausea caused by chemotherapy is probably the most
accepted of marijuana's medical uses, although the American Medical
Association and the federal government maintain that none of the drug's
reported benefits has been sufficiently proved.

Stauffer said she knows of a few local cancer patients using marijuana,
either because other antinausea drugs failed them or because their
appetites need stimulating. She said the local club might help some
patients who have no idea where to obtain marijuana, but she expects few
will want to take the legal risk.

Lowering eye pressure for glaucoma patients also is among marijuana's
bestdocumented benefits. But its usefulness has been eclipsed by
several new eye drops developed in the past three years that do so just
as well, says the Glaucoma Research Foundation, a national nonprofit
based in San Francisco.

Cost is a factor

At Being Alive, a San Diego AIDS support and service agency that sees
200 people a month, peer advocate coordinator Greg Curran estimated that
fewer than 10 percent use marijuana. There are other ways to stimulate
appetite, he said, including hypnotherapy, acupuncture and exercise.

In addition, he said many people with advanced AIDS are living on
disability checks of about $630 a month and can't afford marijuana
unless the club significantly undercuts street prices.

Markgraaff said he intends to lower the prices only slightly, because of
the risk that cutrate pot would be resold for profit.

The club's prices now hover around the street price of $400 an ounce,
depending on quality. Patients use varying amounts, generally spending
from $50 to $200 a week.

At the Cannabis Cultivator's Club in San Francisco, the 3yearold
granddaddy of buyers' clubs, founder Dennis Peron said members can
choose from eight grades of marijuana ranging from $40 to $480 an ounce,
or 30 percent below street price.

Peron said his club has more than 5,000 members and now has four
competitors in San Francisco. In all, Peron said, he knows of 16 buying
clubs around the state, but he also knows of eight people who have been
arrested for medical use or cultivation of marijuana.

In San Diego, a 35yearold man with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is
in jail after police found 13 ounces of marijuana in his downtown hotel
room in February. The man, Dedrek Fields, maintains that he uses the
drug to combat HIV symptoms but that his doctor refused to recommend it
because of the federal threats, said his lawyer, public defender Ron
Vanesian. Trial is set for May 16.

Easing the pain

Several of the San Diego club's members said they have discussed their
marijuana use with every doctor they see and none has tried to dissuade
them. Sharon, a 48yearold parttime bookkeeper, said the specialist
she sees for Tourette's syndrome agreed to recommend marijuana because
it had helped some of his other patients.

After smoking marijuana for the past year, Sharon said it has helped her
and eliminated the migraines that plagued her for 10 years.

All of the San Diego club's members so far were recreational marijuana
smokers at some time in their lives. They say they do not smoke enough
now to feel high; some believe, as Debbie said, that "the pain swallows
it up."

Jim, who is 43, was diagnosed four years ago with AIDS and has just
learned that he also has an unusual form of lymphoma. Like others with
AIDS, he says smoking marijuana stimulates his appetite enough to
prevent the wasting syndrome that devastates many AIDS patients.

He also is taking a new combination of drugs called protease inhibitors,
which clearly get much of the credit for his improved health, but he is
convinced that marijuana adds to his vitality.

Markgraaff, determined that the club become better known as San Diego's
source of medical marijuana, quit his bakery job last week to work on
club business full time. He will be paid $100 a week, if he can raise
that much.

The club needs to spend $30 for a business license and $800 for fees to
incorporate and obtain nonprofit status, he said. It also is desperately
seeking a storefront or other location where it could distribute and
grow marijuana.

If no property donor materializes, Markgraaff plans to ask the City
Council for a building or land. Mayor Susan Golding said, through press
secretary MaryAnne Pintar, that approval is unlikely and that she would
"definitely not support it."

Eventually, Markgraaff said, he hopes to teach members to grow their own
marijuana and give them starter plants. But the club also must have a
ready supply, he said.

Markgraaff insists that his goal is not just to get people smoking
marijuana but to improve their health.

"Ultimately, we want people to get well and stop smoking," he said.