POT GUIDELINES SOOTHE FEARS

Medical Marijuana Users Grateful To Sonoma County For Spelling Out Rules

Beckie Nikkel, a mother and Christian missionary in Santa Rosa, has a
medical secret. She said she's thankful to Sonoma County authorities for
allowing her to feel safer talking about it.

Nikkel, 47, uses marijuana for relief from the spasms and other
debilitating effects of multiple sclerosis. She has pretty much kept word
of the medication to herself, she said, because of the stigma that
surrounds marijuana and because of the chance that narcotics police might
appear at her door.

But she said a load's been lifted since the county's top law enforcement
officials last month adopted guidelines that allow patients with physician
approval to grow or possess a specific amount of marijuana. That amount, up
to 3 pounds per year, is substantially more than is permitted in most other
California counties.

Five years after state voters approved marijuana-as-medicine by passing the
ambiguously worded Proposition 215, the new county rules seek to resolve
uncertainty. The rules were written for the benefit of patients who have
feared arrest and confiscation, and of police left by a legislative vacuum
to decide how much marijuana a patient reasonably needs to grow or possess.

The county guidelines "give some added protection for my family," said
Nikkel, who uses about three grams of cannabis a day, either eaten in baked
goods or inhaled through a vaporizer. Unable to grow her own marijuana, she
gets it from a caregiver who grows it.

Nikkel said the county's guidelines are a hopeful sign that the culture is
slowly accepting that whatever else marijuana is, the much maligned, much
mythicized plant is good medicine for many seriously ill people.

She said she is not a pothead but a regular person who developed a serious
illness and who uses cannabis because it stops her muscle spasms, relieves
the pain caused by misfiring nerves, helps her sleep, stimulates her
appetite, calms her anxiety and provides her a natural alternative to
pharmaceuticals.

"If I have to have MS, I'm just grateful I'm in Sonoma County," she said.

Russian River resident George Quarles, who grows the marijuana he smokes
for relief from the pain of a bad hip and knee and the lingering effects of
a car crash that nearly killed him, said the guidelines have him feeling
both grateful and relieved.

With the enactment of the guidelines, Quarles, 51, no longer has to worry
about law enforcement officers coming onto his property, deciding he has
too many plants and plucking some of them out.

He said the combination of Proposition 215 and the county rules gives him
the peace of mind of knowing that if deputies were to come onto his land,
they would find him in compliance with the law and leave his plants alone.

"I don't want to be a criminal; I feel like a law-abiding citizen now," he
said.

He acknowledges that he smoked marijuana recreationally for years before he
was hurt -- first in a football game three decades ago that mangled his
knee and then in a 1998 traffic collision near Rohnert Park in which his
injuries included 22 bone fractures.

Mostly, he said, the marijuana "lets me forget that I hurt."

Quarles said his life has been better because of the relief he gets from
marijuana, and is far better now that the Sonoma County guidelines legalize
his garden.

The guidelines emerged from talks among Mullins, Sonoma County Sheriff's
officials and members of the Sonoma Alliance for Medical Marijuana. The
central objective was to arrive at a quantity of marijuana that would
ensure that a patient had a sufficient supply, while at the time assuring
police or deputies that a garden is not large enough to justify suspicions
that it is in fact a black market, for-profit operation.

Over the years since voters approved Proposition 215, law officers in the
county have on occasion ripped out some of a patients' plants after
concluding that the crop was larger than necessary. In a pair of highly
publicized cases, Mullins' office prosecuted the operators of large-scale
growing operations that provided marijuana to medicinal buyers' clubs.

The new rules, approved last month by the Sonoma County Law Enforcement
Chiefs Association, seek to provide guidance and to discourage large
growing operations by assuring patients and small-scale caregivers that
they can grow reasonably sized gardens without fear of police trouble.

At the suggestion of the Sonoma County advocacy group, Mullins and the law
enforcement chiefs agreed not to limit gardens to a small number of plants,
as is done in most other counties. Because the yield of usable marijuana
can vary greatly from plant to plant, the guidelines state that a
doctor-approved patient may grow as many plants as necessary -- to a limit
of 99 -- to produce 3 pounds of dried and processed marijuana.

Also to help guide patients and police, the Sonoma County rules specify
that the leafy canopy of an acceptable marijuana garden may cover no more
than 100 square feet.

"We want to make this work," said Sheriff's Lt. Bruce Rochester.

When deputies are drawn to a crop of marijuana by a citizen's report or a
sighting from an airplane, he said, the guidelines will help them determine
if it is in fact being grown as medicine.

Sheriff's officials and the Alliance for Medical Marijuana recommend that
patients have on hand their doctor's permission, and that caregivers
growing marijuana for a patient or patients be able to identify those patients.

Rochester observed that most of the marijuana grown in Sonoma County is not
medicine but is illegal and grown for profit, often on forested property
owned by people or agencies that don't even know it's there. Of 45,000
plants confiscated by deputies last year, he said, only about 2,000 were
purported to be grown as medicine.

Mary Pat Beck of the the Alliance for Medical Marijuana said the county
guidelines aren't perfect. Beck, a Cazadero resident who cultivates an
outdoor marijuana garden with her husband, a cancer survivor, said the
rules don't acknowledge that some people, such as her husband, need more
than the allowed 3 pounds per year.

Despite that, she said, the guidelines are a tremendous step forward.

"This creates a safety zone for many, many patients," she said. The
advocacy group estimates that about 1,000 Sonoma County residents have
physician approval to use marijuana.

Said Beck, "I'm really hoping this promotes better relations between
patients and officers."