FOR SOME, CANNABIS IS BALM

Even Officials Uncertain On California Law

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. - The medical marijuana club located atop an
automotive parts store is closed to buyers on Tuesdays, a relatively quiet
time to tend to the crop and catch up on paperwork.

Yesterday the first frantic phone call came into the Los Angeles Cannabis
Resource Center at 6 a.m. The calls didn't stop coming all day.

A day after the US Supreme Court banned the distribution of marijuana for
any reason, club members said they were worried that their relief would be
cut short. They talked anxiously about waning appetites and ebbing
strength. They wondered aloud whether the black market would become their
only option, rather than their last resort.

Official seeks review

The people who say they depend on medical marijuana to ease their agony
weren't alone in their confusion. Even at the State House in Sacramento, no
one was sure what impact the court's decision would have in California. The
state's attorney general, Bill Lockyer, called the unanimous ruling
unfortunate and said it needed further review.

''Nobody knows what's going on,'' said Scott Imler, president of the
Cannabis Resource Center in West Hollywood. ''People don't know what
they're going to do if the clubs are shut down. It's not like they can just
find another source.''

The clubs and their clients have always known they could be shut down. Not
even the 1996 passage of Proposition 215, which permits patients to grow
and use small amounts of marijuana for medical reasons, allayed fears of
police raids or federal prosecution. When California became the first of
nine states to legalize medical marijuana, the state was in direct conflict
with federal drug laws. It still is.

''The court decision could be the signal of the end of cannabis clubs, or
they could just decide to leave us alone,'' said the Rev. Lynette Shaw, a
founder of the Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana, a club in northern
California. ''This is very, very frightening, and it's meant to be. It's an
incredibly cruel thing to do to people who are already ill.''

Lawyers involved in the medical marijuana issue stressed that the court
decision did not prevent individuals from obtaining medical marijuana.
Instead, the decision only addressed clubs that distribute large quantities
of marijuana. The specific case before the Supreme Court involved an
Oakland marijuana cooperative that had raised a medical-necessity defense
when the federal government tried to shut it down.

Some clubs stopped

The Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative, established with the approval of
city officials and local police, no longer dispenses medical marijuana.
Three other northern California clubs named in a January 1998 lawsuit by
the federal government have also shut down. But leaders of the Marin club,
also named in the suit that led to Monday's court action, insist that it
will remain open.

Still, Shaw said she is encouraging patients to begin cultivating their own
marijuana plants.

Dave Fratellos, a spokesman for Santa Monica-based Americans for Medical
Rights, said: ''The Supreme Court hasn't said there's no way to do
distribution. They just said the cooperative arrangement was not legal.

''But there's no permanent protection for anyone until they change the
law'' to reclassify medical marijuana as a legal drug under certain
circumstances, said Fratellos, whose organization has sponsored eight
successful state medical marijuana initiatives.

Law to be revamped

Both advocates and opponents of medical marijuana agree that the California
law was poorly worded and needs revamping, a process already underway.
Fratellos said his group is working with Maine and Nevada to create
state-authorized distribution systems that would circumvent concerns raised
in Monday's court ruling.

As Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for California's attorney general, put it,
''We're sort of at the `where do we go from here?' point.''

At the club in West Hollywood, Imler said he didn't know where patients
would turn if the club closed.

So far, the club has maintained good relations with both local law
enforcement and the city. With about 860 members ranging in age from 19 to
86, the club distributes more than 250 pounds of marijuana a year, much of
it grown in the basement and on a plot of land in Ventura County.

Patients can smoke marijuana on the premises, relaxing on one of the sofas
or reading in one of the mismatched chairs. But sharing is prohibited.
Imler, scowling at the pill bottles in his desk drawer, said he relies on
medical marijuana to ease his epileptic seizures.

Variety of ailments

About 80 percent of the members have AIDS and 10 percent have one form of
cancer or another. The remainder suffer from a variety of ailments, from
glaucoma to multiple sclerosis. Payment is on a sliding scale, depending on
income.

''We set up these clubs as a stop-gap measure, believing, naively, that our
democratic institutions would take care of us,'' Imler said. ''We'd like
nothing better than for someone to come up with a better distribution
system or to just make medical marijuana legal for people who need it. We'd
like to get on with our lives already.''