MEDICAL POT GURU READY FOR SENTENCING

Advocate Predicts He Won't Serve Any Time

America's most celebrated drug defendant has spent what may be his final
days before prison working quietly in his Oakland office, preparing his
magazine columns and his next book about marijuana growing.

No big send-offs. No wild parties for the icon of the medical marijuana
movement.

"I'd like to be a pop culture figure, but I don't think it's going to go
that way," Ed Rosenthal said from Los Angeles, where he was attending a
publisher's trade show over the weekend. "I'm dealing with constitutional
issues and people's rights."

Besides, Rosenthal said, he doesn't think he'll spend a day behind bars,
despite prosecutors' request for a five-year sentence on his conviction for
violating federal cultivation laws. "Once this goes into appeals, the laws
will be changed and the conviction will be overturned," he said.

Rosenthal, who grew marijuana for patients at a San Francisco dispensary,
will go before a judge Wednesday for sentencing. His case has become a
national symbol for the clash between state medical cannabis laws - which
allow patients to use the drug to relieve pain and ease debilitating
effects of conventional therapies - and the absolute federal ban on marijuana.

The case is "a wake-up call to the nation about what's happening in
California," said Steph Sherer, a medical marijuana patient and executive
director of Americans for Safe Access, which supports the state laws and
opposes federal intervention. "The people who are being targeted are people
who are outspoken."

Rosenthal is outspoken and high-profile - in books and magazine articles,
numerous interviews during and after his trial, and in the "Free Ed"
billboard messages posted by local supporters since his conviction. But
he's not exactly flamboyant.

Sober Viewpoint

His latest book, "Why Marijuana Should Be Legal," co-authored with former
drug defendant Steve Kubby, is not a summons to turn on, tune in and drop
out, but instead is a sober look at what the authors consider the excessive
social and financial costs of marijuana prohibition.

No Timothy Leary

These are not the 1960s, and Rosenthal is no Timothy Leary.

That may be why he and others like him are so irksome to John Walters, head
of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

The marijuana movement activists of an earlier day wore long hair and
tie-dye and the issue easy to defeat at the polls, as shown by the 2-1 vote
against a 1972 California initiative that would have repealed criminal
penalties for personal use of marijuana. Today's movement comes in the garb
of AIDS and cancer patients and caregivers and seems to have won the
support of the voters, if not their political leaders.

No Comment on Case

Walters' office refused to comment on Rosenthal's case. Dr. Andrea
Barthwell, deputy director for demand reduction, would say only that
federal drug regulation was designed "to protect people from hack medicine"
and that "it is an insult to our medical process to say that the best we
can do is a smoked weed to help people who have terminal medical conditions."

But Walters was more explicit when Maryland, the most recent of nine states
to pass medical marijuana laws, was considering its proposal to reduce
criminal penalties for medical use of the drug. He fumed against a
"cynical, cruel and immoral effort to use the sick and suffering" to move
toward legalization of marijuana.

Federal opposition failed to dissuade California voters from approving the
trail-blazing Proposition 215 in 1996 and has been largely unsuccessful in
stopping the spread of state medical marijuana laws. But both the Bush and
Clinton administrations have been able to limit the effects of those laws
by playing the legal trump card of federal drug prohibitions, which
override state laws.

California Focus

The federal effort has concentrated on California, where Prop. 215 allows
patients to use marijuana with a doctor's recommendation.

Federal authorities have raided pot farms and dispensaries up and down the
state, filed numerous criminal charges, obtained prison sentences against
at least four growers and have prosecutions pending against about a dozen
others, according to advocates. But the case that has captured public
attention has been Rosenthal's.

Sometimes described as the world's foremost authority on growing marijuana,
the 58-year-old New York native is a longtime magazine columnist and author
of more than a dozen books. His arrest in February 2002, on charges of
growing marijuana for the Harm Reduction Center in San Francisco, was a
coup for drug enforcers. From a public relations standpoint, however, the
case has been mostly a nightmare for the government and a windfall for the
movement.

Medical Issue Denied

When U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer barred evidence of Rosenthal's
medical motives, advocates proclaimed that the voters' will was being
thwarted and the jury was being misled. A majority of the jurors apparently
agreed, because they disavowed their guilty verdicts soon after the trial
when they learned what had been kept from them during the proceedings - for
example, that the city of Oakland had designated Rosenthal as an agent in
its medical marijuana program.

Seven jurors and two alternates told Breyer last week in a letter that they
oppose a prison sentence for Rosenthal and plan to attend Wednesday's hearing.

Rosenthal will be sentenced under a federal law requiring at least five
years in prison for cultivation of more than 100 marijuana plants. But a
so-called safety-valve law allows a lesser sentence for nonviolent,
first-time offenders who cooperate with authorities and have not acted as
leaders or organizers of crimes.

The court probation office concluded that Rosenthal qualified for the
safety valve and recommended a year and nine months in prison. Rosenthal's
lawyers say his humanitarian motives justify a sentence of probation.

Free on Bail

Whatever the sentence, Rosenthal said he expects Breyer to let him remain
free on bail while he appeals, noting that the judge has already found that
he poses no danger.

He is confident of winning his appeal, which will focus on the evidence
excluded by Breyer - but added that, win or lose, the cause will be advanced.

"I'm proud of what I did," Rosenthal said. "I take responsibility for what
I did. If the court finds that I should go to prison, I think that they
(the government) will ultimately regret it.

"I think it will just disgust the American people and make them more
adamant that patients should be allowed to get their medicine."