MEDICAL MARIJUANA ADVOCATES SHIFT GEARS IN CALIFORNIA
By A. Kronstadt
Ever since the May 22 California StatePolice raid on the Cannabis Buyers
Club effectively shut down the public distribution of marijuana for medical
use in San Francisco, activists favoring legalizing the use of marijuana as
medicine have adopted a legislative agenda. SHADOW readers will recall that
in 1996, California voters by an 80% margin approved Proposition 215, a
referendum legalizing the use of marijuana with a doctor's prescription, as
well as cultivation of the marijuana plant for purposes of filling such a
prescription. From 1992 until the raid in May of 1998, the Cannabis Buyers
Club ran a distribution center out of three stories of a loft building on
San Francisco's Market Street where thousands of persons with medical
prescriptions were supplied with pot for a wide variety of ailments,
ranging fro nausea brought about by AIDS and chemotherapy to glaucoma,
Crohn's disease, and amytrophic lateral sclerosis. Though the club was left
alone for years by San Francisco authorities, on May 22, state cops, acting
on the authorization of California Attorney General Dan Lundgren, raided
the club, seized pot and patient records and later made several arrests.
Since then, clandestine buyers clubs have continued to supply pot to
persons with physicians' recommendations, but these are a far cry from the
Cannabis Buyers Club wide open operation at 1444 Market Street, which sold
hash oil, brownies, marijuana candy, and several different grades of the
weed, to be taken home or eaten or smoked on the premises in a wholesome
atmosphere where a whole floor was reserved for non tobacco smokers. The
new underground clubs are more or less tolerated by the San Francisco
police under the administration of Mayor Willie Brown and liberal District
Attorney Terrence Hallinan, but as marijuana rights activist John
Entwhistle told the SHADOW: "We don't want to be tolerated. We want to be
legal." Entwhistle is a co-author of Proposition 215 and a spokesperson for
California Compassionate Use, an organization advocating the legal use of
marijuana in medicine. Entwhistle's primary work has been in the legal
cultivation of pot at a farm in Lake County in Northern California, where
the 9-foot pot plants benefit from rich volcanic soil. Entwhistle told the
SHADOW that although the Cannabis Buyers Club was closed under provisions
of California law outlawing sales or distribution of marijuana, the
cultivation of pot for medical purposes is clearly legal under the terms of
Proposition 215. Although marijuana cultivation is prohibited under Federal
Law, there has been little effort on the part of the DEA or the Justice
Department to interfere with the activities at the farm. "We turn ourselves
in to the DEA before every harvest," said Entwhistle, describing the game
of cat and mouse in which the staff of the farm inform the feds each year
of the legality, under California law, of what they are doing. Entwhistle
spoke of the two-pronged strategy for legalizing medical marijuana on a
California-wide level and on a Federal level -- a struggle which has often
led "compassionate use" activists in contradictory directions. In
California, the focus has been on inserting a medical exception into
Article 11360 of the California penal code, which criminalizes the sale of
marijuana. Although Proposition 215 clearly legalizes the use of pot with a
doctor's recommendation, not necessarily even a formal prescription, and
makes cultivation for distribution to patients with such recommendation
legal, Article 11360 prohibits all marijuana sales. According to
Entwhistle, advocates for the medical use of pot will "go to Sacramento
this December and January when the laws are being written and carry the
issue of changing the law on sale right to the governor's desk." Activists
are counting on the election of Democrat Gray Davis as governor, who is
running against none other than Attorney General Dan Lundren, Republican
archconservative in the Reagan mold and nemesis of the Cannabis Buyers
Club. In a recent debate, Lundgren accused Davis of not being a "real
supporter of the death penalty." Anxious to re-establish his law and order
credentials, the Democrat responded that California needed to be made "more
like Singapore." When asked whether Davis' reference to the hard-line Asian
nation was inauspicious for those counting on him to support the effort to
legalize medical marijuana, Entwhistle recalled California's love- hate
relationship with law enforcement. "Don't listen to Gray Davis. Nobody
remembers what he says or does. That's why they call him `Gray.' If it's
him or Dan Lundgren, the choice is obvious. He has a career of doing very
little in politics and if the bill got as far as him, he'd sign it." As of
mid-September, Davis had a twelve-point lead over Lundgren in the polls. A
different front on which the fight for medical marijuana is being fought is
on the Federal level, where the battlefield is more administrative than
legislative. Quietly, and in the absence of overt attempts by the Justice
Department to interfere, the move is on to "re-schedule" marijuana from a
Schedule One drug, the most serious category which pot presently shares
with heroin, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and other drugs that are
considered to have no medical use and production of which are prohibited,
to a Schedule Two drug. Schedule Two drugs, like Valium and Prozac, are
federally regulated, but may be administered by a physician legally and
consequently can be manufactured by pharmaceutical companies possessing a
license. "With a prescription you'd be able to buy pot at Walgreens, but
you could still go to jail for growing it yourself," Entwhistle told the
SHADOW, apparently favoring the Proposition 215 approach of legalizing
cultivation. "If you made Vitamin C Schedule 2, you'd have a scurvy
epidemic because of all the details. Chemotherapy patients might need an
eighth of an ounce a day to keep their appetites up, and the only way
people of modest means could afford this would be to grow it themselves."
The DEA has dropped opposition to rescheduling pot, and the FDA will have
to agree before this could happen. "We are not going to have another
Cannabis Buyers Club where pot is openly sold because we have to maintain
our identity as not selling pot for the time being," Entwhistle told the
SHADOW. Asked about the approach now being taken in Oakland where the City
Council, under the administration of newly-elected Mayor (and former
California Governor) Jerry Brown, has unanimously voted to make officials
of the Cannabis Buyers Club officers of the City, like executives of the
Motor Vehicle Bureau, thereby officially challenging California Attorney
General Lundgren to come into direct conflict with the local government if
he tries to shut down the sale of medical marijuana, Entwhistle said: "It's
good, but as long as the state law doesn't change, it [Oakland's policy]
gives one group of people a monopoly." Entwhistle described the difficulty
in getting medical marijuana legalized in terms of the newness of the issue
and the rate at which information flows. "People understand about the
effects of chemotherapy and glaucoma, but they haven't heard about the
other developments in the application of marijuana -- in Crohn's disease,
Lou Gehrig's disease, and alcoholism." He cogently summed up the reason for
stressing medical marijuana over the legalization of marijuana for
recreational and personal use: "The Netherlands has a tradition of
tolerance because they've been turned off to authoritarian solutions. They
recognize Nazism for what it is. There, marijuana is illegal, but
tolerated. Here, things have to be legal or illegal. You can have tolerance
one day, and the next day the government will come down on you. The only
chance we have for legalization, right now, is with medical marijuana."
Dennis Peron, another author of Proposition 215 and one of those still
facing charges of selling pot after the closing of the Cannabis Buyers
Club, quoted Ho Chi Minh: "You pull back when your enemy is strong, and
fight again another day." Looking forward to the demise of Dan Lungren's
reign in Sacramento, he predicted "In the end, democracy will prevail."