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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."