IT'S 'WARFARE' - MEDI-POT ACTIVISTS ARE MAD AS HELL

San Diego, CA -- Already steaming mad about the county Board of
Supervisors' decision to sue the state in federal court to overturn
the law that allows sick people to use marijuana as medicine,
activists who gathered in University Heights Monday night were
furious about the raids on pot dispensaries that occurred earlier in
the day-and vowing not to back down in the face of what they called
federal law-enforcement intimidation.

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration on Monday led a
multi-agency assault on 13 dispensaries in San Diego County,
handcuffing whomever was inside the shops and confiscating products,
computers and patient records.

Tony Amarine, 32, who runs Utopia, an Ocean Beach dispensary, said
the aggressive manner in which heavily armed agents came bursting
into his shop made him feel like they must have thought it was
al-Qaeda's headquarters: "Guns to my forehead, handcuffed, down on
the ground." He pulled up a pant leg and revealed a bloody scrape he
said he suffered when manhandled. A DEA spokesman didn't return
CityBeat's call.

Eight to 10 agents raided Utopia, Amarine estimated. Once the place
was secured, he said, one agent opened an envelope and began to read
its contents, a list of things they were searching for-"about a
thousand things," he said, adding that they left after three or four hours.

"All I do is sell weed to sick people," Amarine said, vowing to open
again on Tuesday and then sue the federal government.

Utopia serves 2,000 to 3,000 patients, he said, including 150 who are
terminally ill. "They're scared," he said. "They're not going to get
medicine. They're gonna go back to the streets. or they're going to
go without."

"Anne," a 45-year-old patient who declined to give her real name,
said she favors pot over prescription drugs for the fibromyalgia she
suffers from. Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition that causes pain in
muscles, ligaments and tendons and affects mostly women. In addition
to relieving some of the pain, marijuana relaxes her muscles, eases
her anxiety and helps her sleep.

If she can't get pot at a dispensary, Anne said, "I'll exhaust my
existing resources [and then] I'll buy it back on the streets. That's
what Prop. 215 was trying to eliminate."

Prop. 215's intent lay at the heart of the San Diego Police
Department's decision to take part in Monday's raids. Assistant
Police Chief Cheryl Meyers told CityBeat Tuesday that had the raids
been only a product of the federal government's attitude that
medicinal marijuana is just as illegal as recreational marijuana, San
Diego Police would not have participated.

However, Meyers said, "we were convinced; the evidence was there"
that each of the 13 locations raided were acting outside the
boundaries of Prop. 215 and the city's medical-marijuana guidelines.
She said state and city laws do not allow for caregivers, which is
what the dispensaries are supposed to be, to make a profit. "They're
jacking up the prices so steep [that] they're making a profit off of
the illness" of their patients, "and they were very loose in who they
sold the marijuana to." She added that in most cases, the
dispensaries had more pot on hand than city law allows. The
guidelines allow caregivers to have two pounds of pot and 48 plants.
Most dispensaries had more, she said. One had psychedelic mushrooms;
several had hash (although, she acknowledged that the police are
struggling with whether or not hash-concentrated THC, the active
ingredient in pot-is allowed.

Of particular concern, Meyers said, was the fellow police officers
found out in a Loma Portal dispensary parking lot who had two pounds
of pot, $2,600 in cash and a firearm on him, and another guy coming
into a Kearny Mesa dispensary with two pounds of pot who said he'd
picked the stuff up in Palm Springs and had heard he could unload it
at the dispensary for $3,000 and an $800 profit. That's the sort of
activity Meyers said San Diego doesn't want or need. Both men were arrested.

As for the patients who count on dispensaries, Meyers said, "they'll
have to find a caregiver that fits within the guidelines of Prop. 215."

In University Heights Monday evening, activist Dion Markgraaff,
coordinator for the San Diego chapter of Americans for Safe Access,
an organization that advocates on behalf of patients wanting to smoke
pot to alleviate symptoms, helped organize the crowd of several dozen
people at Twiggs coffeehouse. "I regard [the raids] as a political
tactic used often by the U.S. government: low-intensity warfare," he said.

Markgraaff urged the crowd to gather downtown the next day to protest
the government's actions: "This day is going to live in history in
this town, and we have to make the most of it."