Moving to Semantical High Ground
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California Marijuana Club Stands Firm Against Court Rulings
By JAMES BROOKE
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 27 - The advertised price was $30 for an eighth of an ounce of "Five Star Mexican Gold," and dollar bills were exchanged at a brisk clip today for plastic bags of marijuana. But, in deference to a new court ruling barring the sale of the drug by clubs, a hastily erected sign over the marijuana bar read: "Remuneration Station."
"We are not selling marijuana anymore," Dennis Peron, founder of the Cannabis Cultivators Club, said today, explaining his latest strategy to keep open what looks like America's closest copy of an Amsterdam hashish bar. "We are selling fertilizer, nutrients, lighting, pruning, the labor for production."
Not so, retorts Dan Lungren, Caiifornia's Attorney General and a Republican candidate for governor. The state's roughly 20 "cannabis clubs" will have to close, he said, based on a State Supreme Court decision on Wednesday. The court let stand a lower court ruling that clubs, because they are not "primary caregivers," cannot sell or give away marijuana to ill people. And on Thursday, a San Francisco County Superior Court judge issued a preliminary injunction, based on those same grounds, prohibiting Mr. Peron from selling, furnishing or giving away marijuana.
In 1996, California voters approved a measure to allow primary caregivers to administer marijuana to the ill, under a doctor's supervision.
Ignoring this week's court ruling, Mr. Peron's five-story emporium served about 1,000 members today. In his office, barely screened from the thick clouds of marijuana smoke, -Mr. Peron vowed to "wait for the tanks."
Behind his desk was a hand-sewn silk banner, resplendent with green marijuana leaves, announcing his campaign to win the Republican nomination for governor.
" I'm going to have to be governor, so I can pardon myself," joked Mr. Peron, who won his spot on the ballot two weeks ago under the state's new open primary law. Mr. Peron gleefully noted that the primary battle pitted him against his nemesis, Mr. Lungren, who shut down Mr. Peron's Cannabis Buyers Club for five months in 1996. The club reopened after the state referendum.
On hearing that Mr. Peron planned to run against him in the June 2 primary, Mr. Lungren responded, "If Dennis Peron is running for governor on the Republican ticket, he has smoked more marijuana than even I thought."
The animus between the two men reflects how little was solved by the referendum in November 1996, when 56 percent of voters approved the medical use of marijuana.
Today, about 10,000 ailing Californians are thought to buy marijuana for medical use. Marijuana is used by AIDS sufferers to restore their appetites, by cancer and chemotherapy patients to control nausea, by people with multiple sclerosis to control muscle spasms, and by people with glaucoma to reduce blinding pressures in their eyes.
"I have been using marijuana every day for the last six years," Hazel Rodgers, a 78-year-old who has glaucoma, said today between puffs on her pipe at the Cannabis Club. "It keeps the pressure down in your eyes. I also use it for arthritis."
On Monday and Tuesday, the medical effectiveness of marijuana was debate at hearing in Washington conducted by The Naional Accademy of Sciences. And the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy has commissioned a $1 million study on the issue, which is to be ready by December.
In November, voters in Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, Nevada, Washington D.C., and Washington State are expected to vote on medical marijuana measures like the ones passed in California and in Arizona in 1996.
"We believe we are going to have strong victories in those states," said Robert Kampia, a director of the Marijuana Policy Project, a group that lobbies for medical access to marijuana. National polls, he said, show widespread support for allowing ailing people to use marijuana.
But state and Federal officials have shown their determination to prevent Northern California from becoming the nation's pot pioneer.
Last month, six of the cannabis clubs operating in the Bay area were named in a lawsuit filed by the Federal Government that sought court orders to close them for violating Federal laws against growing, distributing and possessing marijuana. Since then, three of the clubs have closed. In legal papers filed today, lawyers for the clubs contend that the Federal Government has no jurisdiction because all the marijuana the clubs distribute is grown in California and interstate commerce laws do not apply.
But Michael Yamagdchi, United States Attorney for Northern California, said in seeking the court orders: "Under our system of Federalism, laws passed by Congress cannot be overridden or supplanted by state law. Federal law continues to prohibit the distribution of marijuana at the cannabis clubs."
In a warning to other medical marijuana clubs in California, Gregory King, a Department of Justice spokesman, said today: "Our enforcement efforts are continuing. Charges may be brought in the future."
In California, the suits have highlighted the legal gray area of medical marijuana.
In conservative areas like Orange and Ventura Counties in the southern part of the state, sheriffs and local officials have closed clubs, acting as though the 1996 referendum never took place. In more liberal areas, local health and police officials have worked with cannabis clubs, encouraging such controls as standard medical forms from doctors and photo identification cards for members.
Until the Federal civil suits were anno unced, officials in San Mateo
County, a coastal area south of San Francisco, were drawing up plans to provide marijuana to certified ill people through public dispensaries. North of San Francisco, in Mendocino County, local officials debated whether to use a vacant lot behind the Fort Bragg police station to grow marijuana, which city police would then distribute to registered sick people. Plans have since been suspended.
Local officials in Northern California reacted negatively to news of the lawsuits. In Santa Cruz and Oakland, the city councils unanimously passed resolutions condemning the Federal action and defending local cannabis clubs. In San Francisco, where the police and city attorneys have long tolerated the medical use of marijuana, Mayor Willie Brown Jr. attacked the suits.
On another front, doctors and a lawyer in the San Francisco City Attorney's office have brought a class-action suit to prevent Federal authorities from punishing doctors who recommend the medical use of marijuana for patients.
Down at the Cannabis Cultivators Club, which sells about 30 pounds o, marijuana a month, Mr. Peron considers the clubs closing around San Francisco and admits, "Everybody has just panicked."
His assistant, Randi Webster, recalled what happened to her, and to the club's ill clients, when the club closed in 1996.
"Marijuana makes the difference from me being here as a useful member of society and laying at home in the fetal position in constant pain,7" said Ms. Webster, whose illnesses include two kinds of arthritis. Ms. Webster, a 43-yeir-old who has decorated the club with her hand-folded origami swans, added: "With marijuana, I can type 150 words a minute, fold origami and walk without assistance. When the club closed, people died; I was paralyzed."
Nibbling on a Rice Krispie cookie laced with marijuana, Mr. Peron vowed that he and his 8,000 members would resist with civil disobedience if state or Federal agents ever tried to padlock his premises again.
"If they get an injunction against us, we are going to stand in the doorway, and open again," said Mr. Peron, who smokes and eats marijuana to combat depression. "If we can't sell here, we will sell on the sidewalk. They will have to throw all of us in jail."
