THE NEW YORK TIMES "THE METRO SECTION"

FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 1997

THE MARIJUANA CLUB

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Tuesday. An Apartment. Three Pounds From Mexico.

By IAN FISHER

The woman stood patiently in line, a pair of reading glasses looped around her neck, for more than an hour before it was her turn to go into the bedroom. She is 49, a nurse with two grown children. Next to the bed, a man in a baseball cup - "I'm going by `Joe' tonight," he said earlier by way of introduction - sat by a scale and what was left of three pounds of marijuana. She bought her usual week's supply and squeezed out into a living room far too small to comfortably hold the 59 other sick people there, most of them AIDS patients. She was not nervous. No police officer, she said, would possibly arrest her, a woman with breast cancer who smokes marijuana to ease the nausea from chemotherapy. Sometimes, she boils it into tea. "I'm also a social worker a master's degree," she said, quitely running through credentials that added up to complete respectability. "I taught school for 14 years. I went to Adelphi University. And you can use my name if you want." The woman, Iris Cruz, does not mind if the world know

s that she considers marijuana a useful medicine, an issue that is once again dividing doctors and politicians around the nation. But most of the others crammed into a East Village apartment this week - members of the New York City Medical Marijuana Buyers' Club - were much more cautious with their identities. And with good reason, because under New York State law, they are criminals - buying marijuana each week from a wholesale club with shifting locations referred to over the phone by the code name "the literary group." The club has existed for nearly four years, mostly without much attention, but the passage of referendums in California and Arizona legalizing marijuana for medical uses has caused the group's leaders to go more public, working to make a similar change in New York. The group's leader. Johann Moore, 34, an intense, true-believing political agitator, is raising the group's profile to the point where he hopes someone will do something, though he also hopes that does not mean he will be arreste

d yet again. "I'm concerned about it," he said, as the first of the club's members filed into the apartment as the sun went down on Tuesday. but he said he was convinced that the police "don't want the negative publicity." "They don't want to bust people who are sick and saving their lives, and would say that in court," he added. The stakes are high for the club and may have become higher after the Clinton Administration as a result of the measures in California and Arizona, threatened doctors who prescribed marijuana with penalties, like withholding Medicare payment. Also raising their fears are police shutdowns of buyers' clubs in Key West, Fl, and in San Francisco, where, until August, the Cannabis Buyers' club operated with tolerance from city officials for roughly three years, serving 12,000 people. mostly AIDS patients, in the end. In the New York club, the only one that Mr. Moore said he is aware of in the region, there is a creeping edge of worry. The group is splitting into two sections, with about

40 members each who meet in different places. Some members said they have begun to look at others in the club and wonder if any work for the police. A member, Marcus, 40, a former kindergarten teacher with AIDS who was the host of last week's meeting, said he was not worried about the club's being "busted." "I was worried about me getting busted, as in me," he said. "It was going on in my house with more quantity than most people see in their life." For more than two decades, the issue of marijuana's medical value has raged with few hard conclusions: Advocates claim that the drug, among other uses, relieves nausea from chemotherapy, eases eye pressure for glaucoma victims and stimulates appetite in AIDS patients who are wasting away. Opponents say it does nothing that legal drugs cannot do and its use as medicine could lead toward more liberal marijuana laws. But there is much gray in between, an ambiguity perhaps best summed up in the position of Dr. Donald P. Kotler, a gastroenterologist as St. Luke's-Roos

evelt Hospital Center and one of the nation's top experts on AIDS wasting syndrome. He is not opposed to AIDS patients, or other sick people, using marijuana if it helps them feel better. He said he is not convinced, however, that it actually helps reverse wasting, and said its use as a medicine in general has not been proven. "It's not whether I'm for it or against it," Dr. Kostler said. "I just think that trying to make it a medicine is stretching it a little bit." Though the West Coast initiatives are shining the light of attention here, the issue of medical marijuana in New York is murky and, by all accounts, any drive to make it legal here is loose and barely organized. In the State Assembly, Richard N. Gottfried, a Democratic from Manhattan who is the chairman of the Health Committee, said he intended to introduce a bill this year to legalize marijuana for medical purposes. Though he said he wanted to draft a bill that was more restrictive than the measures in California and Arizona, he said he had lit

tle hope that it would pass this year. The Republicans in the Senate have already vowed to block any such bill. What makes the issue more complicated is that New York already has a medical marijuana law in the books. In 1980, a former State Assemblyman suffering from the late stages of brain cancer, Antonio G. Olivieri, went to Albany to lobby his old colleagues to allow people to use the drug that eased his own nausea from chemotherapy. That year, the Legislature passed a law permitting patients with cancer and glaucoma to obtain marijuana from the State. But the program was cumbersome, and in 1988, the committee at the State Department of Health that oversaw the program was closed. Only two patients were in the program at that time. "There was not a lot of interest," said Kristine A. Smith, a Health Department spokeswoman. Moreover, New York is a state where some experts say medical marijuana is decriminalized in practice,

anyway. In fact, Mr. Moore, the club's leader, had the charges from an arrest in August 1995 - while distributing bags of marijuana to members on the street in the East Village - effectively dropped. At a hearing in April 1996, Judge William Mogulescu of Criminal Court in Manhattan, suggested that decision by the Manhattan District Attorney to dismiss the charges after six months translated into a kind of unofficial recognition of marijuana as medicine. The judge told Mr. Moore: "The fact that they are offering you an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal seems to me, although obviously I cannot speak for the thinking of the New York District Attorney's Office - Lord Knows that - that indicates a recognition on their part that this case is different, that your position has some degree of merit." When the office of the District Attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau and the Police Department were asked to comment on the degree their agencies would tolerate the sale of marijuana for medical purposes, they declined

to respond. The club was formed in early 1993 by Mr. Moore and other advocates as an initiative of Act Up, an AIDS protest group. The members wanted to provide relief to AIDS patients who had lost their appetite from sickness or from huge amounts of medication. It began distributing marijuana free, donated by sympathetic drug dealers who had friends with AIDS. But soon they were forced to begin charging and found themselves on their own after being thrown out of Act Up, as the group fought over personalities and its mission's focus. For applicants to gain admission, they must present Mr. Moore with a doctor's form listing their illnesses. He turns some people away, including one man whose apparently fake documents showed a secondary diagnosis of an irregular Pap smear. Even though Mr. Moore has been open about the club's existence, the members pay particular attention to security,. The location changes every week so as not to become a nuisance to any one police precinct. Members alert each other to the loca

tion under the direction of Mr. Moore, who says he smokes marijuana to relieve symptoms from the Epstein-Barr virus and a chronic intestinal infection. At the meeting on Tuesday, the living room of a man who called himself Will, 39, a former baker, filled up quickly around dusk. mostly with other AIDS patients like himself. One of the first in was a 31-year-old employee of the State Division of Parole who has had non-Hodgkins lymphoma for six years. Over six recent weeks of radiation therapy, he said, as many as eight marijuana cigarettes a day was the only thing that kept him from losing even more weight. He lifted his shirt and pulled the waistband of his baggy jeans several inches from his stomach. "These used to be my pants a week ago," said the man, who was scheduled for exploratory surgery of his stomach on Tuesday. "They are a 36. Now I fit into 32." a web page designer, Terry Baker, 39, an AIDS patient who is from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said he used to spend $200 to $240 for amounts of marijuana bou

ght on the street that now cost him $60 to $80 through the club. He said it has helped him gain back weight and even start working out again. "I had most of my stomach cut out," said Michael, 46, who had stomach cancer and still has trouble eating. "I'm not into recreational highs. It lets me live a normal life." As the apartment filled, and more people began to smoke - at the request of Will, either on the terrace or on the far side of the living room - the mood became much lighter, a party of the very sick. Steve, 39, a neuroscientist who studied opiates in graduate school, lifted his pant leg to show a tattoo of the molecule of THC, an ingredient in marijuana. He has had AIDS since the early 1980's and the drug helps him eat, but he said he smokes no more than one marijuana cigarette a day. "I wouldn't get anything done if I smoked more than that," he said.

THIS MEETING IS CALLED TO ORDER

A meeting of the New York City Medical Marijuana Buyers' Club took place Tuesday at a member's apartment in the East Village, from 4:30 P.M. to 8 P.M.

THE DAY'S PRODUCT: Three pounds of marijuana from Mexico, in two grades, for $3 or $4 a gram, a third of the street price.

THE RULES: Members could smoke but only at the far end of the living room, or on the terrace.

THE PURCHASES: Some members bought enough to use a few times a week; others bought enough for as many as eight marijuana cigarettes a day.

NOTES: It was a long meeting because a large number of members - 60 - came, perhaps because so many had been away for the holidays. As the meeting went on, people began to smoke throughout the apartment.

ATTENDANCE: These were some of the people at the meeting (some refused to be fully identified):

- Iris Cruz, 49, nurse, social worker and former teacher with breast cancer.

- Terry Baker, 39, AIDS patient and Web page designer.

- Will, 39, AIDS patient and former professional baker.

- Steve, 39, AIDS patient and neuroscientist.

- Marcus, 40, AIDS patient and former kindergarten teacher.

- A 27-year-old Columbia graduate student with Crohn's disease.

- A 31 -year-old worker for the State Division of Parole who has non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.