KILLING HIGHLIGHTS RISK OF SELLING MARIJUANA, EVEN LEGALLY

DENVER -- Ken Gorman, an aging missionary of marijuana, was found
murdered in his home here two weeks ago. The unsolved crime is
exposing the tangled threads at the borderland of the legal and
illegal drug worlds he inhabited.

Mr. Gorman, who was 60, legally provided marijuana to patients under
Colorado's medical marijuana law, but he also openly preached the
virtues of illegal use, and even ran for governor in the 1990s on a
pro-drug platform.

In recent years, he had grown frightened as the mainstream medicine
of cannabis care bumped against the unregulated and violent terrain
of the illicit drug market. He had been robbed more than a dozen
times in his home on Denver's west side, had recently gotten a gun
and also talked of installing a steel door and gates.

"Ken was really fed up with the barrage of robberies and he told me
it would never happen again," said Timothy Tipton, a friend and
fellow medical marijuana supplier, who said Mr. Gorman showed him the
gun about two months ago.

Some legal experts say Mr. Gorman's death could lead to a
reconsideration of how medical marijuana is administered here and
elsewhere. Providers are often left exposed and vulnerable because of
the nation's conflicting drug laws, with marijuana use illegal under
federal law but legalized for some medicinal purposes here and in 10
other states.

Since 1997, after the first medical marijuana law was passed in
California, as many as 20 legal marijuana providers have been killed
around the country, mostly in robberies, said Allen St. Pierre, the
executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws, or Norml, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington.

Some in law enforcement, including Colorado's attorney general, John
W. Suthers, say the Gorman killing illuminates more clearly than ever
that crime and marijuana cannot be disentangled.

"Mr. Gorman showed that the law is abused and can be abused," said
Nate Strauch, a spokesman for Mr. Suthers.

Many people in the medical marijuana supply system say the central
risk comes down to the fact that they work in the shadows, where law
enforcement officials are often either conflicted or hostile and
crime is rampant.

At the Colorado Compassion Club, for instance, which opened last year
as a storefront support center in Denver, the 200 marijuana patients
served there go through as much as a pound of marijuana a day. The
club grows as much as it can, said its founder, Thomas E. Lawrence,
but must rely on buys on the illicit market for the rest, usually
made by one or two caregivers who have volunteered.

Mr. Gorman's killing, legal experts say, has exposed the paradoxes
and ambiguities about medical marijuana that most states have failed
to grapple with.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, which
administers the marijuana program, is not authorized, for example, to
provide information about where the 1,100 patients who are certified
under the program can obtain their drugs, according to the
department's Web site.

The state also does not license marijuana providers, or inspect the
quality of the drug that patients obtain.

Colorado's law allows patients with certain illnesses, as well their
doctors and others who provide care, the right to possess, grow and
transport marijuana.

But all those things remain illegal under federal law. And a chief
deputy district attorney for Denver, Greg Long, said that anyone
selling drugs illegally, even if the final recipient was legally
entitled to possess them, could still technically be violating state
laws too -- though as a practical matter, Mr. Long said, prosecutors
do not generally pursue cases in which the drug being sold is
marijuana for certified medical use.

The portrait of Mr. Gorman is just as unclear. His friends say he was
quixotic and selfless, a man uninterested in financial gain who
tilted against the confining rules of society, especially the drug laws.

A merry prankster at a time when marijuana advocacy groups were
becoming more adept at politics than protest, he had become an
anachronism, acquaintances say, whose counterculture antics
embarrassed and angered many people in the medical-advocacy and legal
reform movements.

"I have gray hair on my head and I attribute some of it to Ken
Gorman," Mr. St. Pierre of Norml said.

Some critics said Mr. Gorman was caught up in his own image as a
rebel, thwarting even the rules about medical marijuana that could
further the causes he espoused.

Just one week before his death, for example, the local CBS television
news affiliate in Denver broadcast an investigative story in which a
young station employee with a hidden camera captured Mr. Gorman
happily explaining how to fake the medical card that would make a
drug transaction appear legitimate.

The story prompted an uproar in medical marijuana circles, forcing
Mr. Gorman to defend himself on a pro-marijuana Internet forum from
attacks by people who said he had betrayed them by making medical
marijuana look like a cover for old-fashioned drug-dealing.

And he had become an angry, fearful man, his friends and
acquaintances said. Though he had served time in prison -- five years
for a felony drug conviction in the mid-1990s -- and often seemed to
scoff at the law, he had grown increasingly frustrated about being a
crime victim himself.

The Denver police have revealed little about the murder investigation.

A spokesman, Sonny Jackson, said the police responded to reports of
shots fired at Mr. Gorman's home around 7 p.m. on Feb. 17 and found
Mr. Gorman with a gunshot wound to the chest. He died shortly thereafter.

Mr. Jackson said that there had been an incident the previous night
in Mr. Gorman's home; someone had been arrested and neighbors
reported shots fired. But investigators said they did not believe
that incident and the slaying were connected.

Colorado's medical marijuana law, enshrined in the state's
Constitution by a statewide vote in 2000, protects people from
prosecution under state law. Acquiring the drug illegally, however,
puts those people in very dangerous company.

Mr. Gorman, his friends say, had no intermediary. The face that was
famous on television as Colorado's most ebullient marijuana advocate
was the same one making the buys out on the market.

"It's dangerous to help people," said Mr. Tipton, who lives in a
suburb of Denver and said he had about 45 marijuana patients. "We're
out there, exposed to abuse from patients, law enforcement, robberies
- -- it's a long list."

Lawyers and medical marijuana advocates in California -- which has
the oldest and by far largest medical marijuana system in the nation,
with about 100,000 licensed drug recipients and 200 dispensaries --
say that robberies and violence against medical distributors, a
problem in the earlier days of the system, have become much less
frequent because of improved security.

But many robberies also often go unreported, said Dale Gieringer, the
state coordinator for the California chapter of Norml.

"It usually gets hushed up," Mr. Gieringer said.

Mr. Gorman's home, still taped off by a police ribbon, has become a
kind of shrine to the subculture he celebrated.

On one night a few days after the killing, a group of more than 20
people -- young men and teenagers, mostly -- sat around a bonfire in
Mr. Gorman's front yard, passing marijuana joints and beer bottles as
a Tupac Shakur song blared on a car stereo.

"He was the most compassionate, kind man I knew," said a young man
who identified himself as Vuddah, as thick curls of smoke shrouded
the group. "We want to keep this place open so that the patients can
keep coming," he added. "That's what we're going to do.

"That's what Ken would have wanted," he continued. "To us, he was a
medical marijuana freedom fighter."

Dan Frosch contributed reporting.