NEW YORK MEDICAL MARIJUANA PATIENTS' CO-OP: OUT AND PROUD

THE HERBALIST--The Unbroke Activist: lifelong Activist Kenneth Toglia Faces
Jail Time for selling Medical Marijuana

Arrested for Giving Marijuana to the Sick, Kenneth Toglia Still Sows Seeds
of Hope

When the cops arrested him this time, Kenneth Toglia was sitting down. It
happened Wednesday, November 8, at a meeting of the New York Medical
Marijuana Patients Cooperative, the buyers' club Toglia operates to sell
marijuana to patients suffering from cancer, AIDS, MS, and glaucoma. The
police tagged him with felony possession, a charge soon dropped to a
misdemeanor.

Though the officers merely ticketed patients, Toglia says, they arrested
two other volunteers of the cooperative, who were meeting in the narrow
East Village walk-up at 130 East Seventh Street near Tompkins Square, and
confiscated more than a pound of pot and a pile of oatmeal raisin cookies
baked with cannabis oil, which give patients with lung disease an easier
way to digest the substance. All but two dozen of the cookies, which
somewhat mysteriously disappeared, turned up in the officers' report.

This is the second time Toglia, a lifelong activist who also coordinates
substance abuse assistance programs at two community service agencies for
the mentally ill and HIV-positive, has been arrested for his efforts to
provide sick people with marijuana, a drug that dramatically relieves
nausea for chemotherapy patients, restores appetite for people with AIDS,
reduces spasticity for MS sufferers, eases inner-eye pressure for those
with glaucoma, and alleviates pain. For this crime, he faces up to a year
in jail and a $1000 fine. His next court date is December 20.

Undaunted, Toglia would like to announce that the cooperative's
Wednesday-night meetings will continue running from 6 to 8 p.m. at the same
place where the activists were busted last time, the University of the
Streets, the 34-year-old community organization that offers rehearsal space
and dance, jazz, and martial arts lessons to the neighborhood. The
cooperative will not sell pot at that site anymore. It will register new
patients for the service there, and then direct them to a new location for
medical marijuana.

A couple other buyers' clubs operate around town, but Toglia's is known for
its efforts to reach out to a poorer, more disenfranchised clientele, even
giving away pot to those who prove they have very low incomes. Buyers'
clubs, which have existed in New York from the late 1980s, have
traditionally been fairly underground groups, rotating their meetings among
a tight circuit of private apartments, advertised by word of mouth. Toglia
holds the cooperative's meetings in semipublic, in the houses of mainstream
institutions that bolster their communities with vital support services.
For a year, the cooperative met in the Gay and Lesbian Community Services
Center on the West Side. The group moved to the University of the Streets
this fall.

"There's a certain security to the club," says Toglia, 34, who lives in
Greenpoint. "They can get pot anywhere. Really what they get from us is a
sense of community and a larger political purpose. We explain to them that
it is quasi-legal and that it really is a kind of civil disobedience on
their part just to have our card. We're registering people to vote now.
It's not required, but we strongly encourage it."

Much like the activists from California involved in the medical marijuana
case the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear last week, Toglia sees himself
as a political activist, not a pot dealer. He knows about the lag between
common knowledge and social change, and has lived a life on the hinge that
swings one to the other: direct action.

Toglia came to New York in the '80s with his single mom, a gay rights
activist. Caught with weed and thrown out of Bryant High School in Queens,
he found the hardcore punk rock scene and, like so many other political
kids, divided his time between Black Flag shows and the radical dreaming of
the Lower East Side squatters. He learned construction and specialized in
seizing abandoned buildings. In 1987, he organized resistance to the
shuttering of a squat on East Fifth Street. In 1988, he helped steer
protests against the curfew at Tompkins Square Park, where disorganized
cops violently assaulted demonstrators and neighborhood residents,
triggering a quake of public outrage. A later clash led to his spending a
year in Rikers Island and Ogdensburg for inciting a riot.

He reentered the world through a work-release program at Housing Works, a
housing organization for people with HIV and AIDS, where he met patients
who told him how marijuana eased their symptoms. In time, he started the
cooperative. "I saw that it was not taken seriously where there was really
a great need for it," he says. "We started out very loose and disorderly,
as you can imagine."

About 10 people now run the cooperative, which is searching for a permanent
sanctuary, possibly a church. The group has more than 600 registered
members. They buy the pot on the black market, and Toglia believes it is
all grown in New York State. Patients who prove that they have a chronic
degenerative or terminal illness-usually with official forms, letters from
their doctors, or prescriptions for commonly known medications-come to
weekly meetings to buy the high-quality weed and enter a supportive
community that provides substance abuse counseling, intervention, and
social service referrals.

The first time Toglia was arrested over medical marijuana, as he was
bringing pot to the house of a bedridden patient, he spent 72 hours in
prison before being arraigned. Finally, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor,
then served his punishment by volunteering at an AIDS organization in
Brooklyn, the kind of work he does anyway. This time, getting out took only
25 hours, and prosecutors reduced his charges to a misdemeanor.

"We told them we'd go to the grand jury and say we were giving it to people
with AIDS, cancer, glaucoma, and MS, and that if they think that's a crime
they can charge us," he says.

Ruth Liebesman, one of Toglia's lawyers, says a verbal understanding with
the district attorney not to prosecute medical marijuana cases has existed
for four years, ever since the first major medical marijuana case in New
York City, when felony charges against a man named Johann Moore were
dismissed. Toglia says a largely sympathetic police force has stopped more
than 40 patients of the cooperative over the past two years and let almost
all of them go, many with their weed. He is now searching for doctors,
nurses, and lawyers to help build the group into a larger nonprofit
harm-reduction outfit with more services, and says activists are discussing
a petition drive to put the issue of medical marijuana laws on the ballot;
similar drives have passed medical marijuana laws in California, Alaska,
Arizona, Hawaii, Maine, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and Colorado.

"I really see the medical marijuana thing as where clean needles were a
couple of years ago," he says. "Established figures don't like it, but the
fact is, the scientific proof is there. It's needed here in New York and
they have to make some kind of allowance for it.

"Eventually the law is going to change. Marijuana prohibition was kept in
place by misinformation. In the Internet age, everybody already knows the
deal."