DEFENDANT CLAIMS JURY SET NEW MEDICAL POT STANDARD

OROVILLE - Michael Farrell's refusal to come down from the roof of his
rented Chico home last month until the news media arrived was only the
opening salvo in what promises to be a spirited legal challenge over how
the state's medical-marijuana law is being interpreted and enforced locally.

The Chapmantown man has since been evicted from the residence and is being
prosecuted on felony cultivation and sales charges.

Unbowed, he says he's more determined than ever to seek a way for others
like him to obtain "safe, legal access" to an herb that not only eases his
physical pain but has gotten him off the bottle after years of struggling
with alcoholism.

Farrell, 35, was detained for questioning one day after a Chico police
detective, reportedly looking for a drive-by shooter, saw what turned out
to be 18 backyard marijuana plants, some as tall as 17 feet, towering over
the roof of Farrell's small Wisconsin Street rental.

Farrell claims he was cultivating the pot for himself and a brother and
several other medical marijuana patients too sick or scared to grow it
themselves.

As for the height of the plants, he said he was trying to obtain a "maximum
yield" and still stay within what he felt was a legal limit.

Authorities in Butte County have warned they will arrest medical marijuana
patients with more than six plants.

But Farrell argues a "local community standard" of 21 pot plants was
established last year when a Superior Court jury acquitted Cohasset
resident Mike Rogers of growing that number in the only other medical
marijuana case to go to trial so far in Butte County.

"I believe that I was complying with the local community standard," Farrell
maintains.

District Attorney Mike Ramsey disagrees.

He contends the Cohasset grower's acquittal last summer was the result of
an "incorrect ruling by the judge" which allowed Rogers to base his defense
partially on "a mistake in law."

"There was no standard set whatsoever in Rogers," the district attorney
said of the prior medical-pot verdict.

Ramsey contends Proposition 215, the 1996 initiative that authorized
smoking marijuana in California with a doctor's recommendation, was
"specifically vaguely worded."

"The challenge is to determine the folks who are using (Proposition) 215 as
it's intended and those who are using it as a license to grow marijuana for
non-medical purposes," said the district attorney.

Butte's six-plant limit is only three less than is allowed in more liberal
Berkeley, Ramsey noted.

But Farrell and his supporters argue that such "arbitrary" limits "subverts
the will of the voters."

Patients in one Southern California county now can't possess or grow more
than one marijuana plant without risking arrest and those living in Sonoma
County are allowed up to 99 plants, notes Farrell.

"They (law enforcement) don't set the law differently for any other crime
in this state, but when it comes to medical marijuana, their attempting to
set different laws, depending on where a person lives - that's
unconstitutional," charges Gordon Dise, one of Farrell's more vocal supporters.

Farrell blames state and local legislators with "abdicating their
responsibility" to provide clear guidelines on how medical marijuana
patients can lawfully obtain a drug a majority of Californians have
approved for medicinal purposes.

"Isn't it ironic that on Election Day six years after the law was passed by
the voters, they are still circumventing the people's will and vote,"
asserted Dise, who lists his occupation as a "legal strategies consultant."

He was among more than a dozen supporters, friends and neighbors
accompanying the defendant to court Tuesday.

Kandy Mitchell, who lives down the street from Farrell, said, "Mike has
helped a lot of people. He's always been law-abiding. I think it's too bad
what they're doing to him ... It's unfair and unjust."

Farrell ran afoul of the law when Chico police officer Kevin Coulombe
reportedly spotted the backyard garden while looking for a drive-by
shooting suspect Sept. 17.

Posting a copy of his medical recommendation on the back gate did not stop
the Butte Interagency Narcotics Task Force from obtaining a search warrant
the next day to raid Farrell's property and remove all but five of his plants.

In addition to the 17-foot-tall plants in the back yard, officers reported
seizing about 10 pounds of drying or processed marijuana inside the
residence, along with "packaging material," which BINTF alleged was
consistent with sales of the drug.

Farrell maintains that after the Chico officer "illegally trespassed on my
property," he had started to cut down and process some of the plants, and
that was what officers found.

If he was in the business of peddling marijuana for profit, the Chico man
contends he wasn't a very good salesman.

His one-room, $175-a-month bungalow didn't even contain a refrigerator or
stove, and Farrell says he is $700 in arrears to PG&E.

Since the well-publicized pot raid, Farrell has been evicted from the
residence where he and his wife had lived about five years, but the
landlord is permitting him to remain on the property in a friend's motor
home until the couple can remove their belongings.

He is due back in court Dec. 3 to enter a plea to the felony cultivation
and sales charges.

If and when the case goes to trial, Farrell said he will produce documents
signed by some 20 other medical-marijuana patients, designating him as
their "primary caregiver."

He says he tried to show those documents to the drug agents during last
month's bust, but they refused to examine them.

"I was simply trying to help others ... who have black thumbs, or are too
sick or too afraid to grow it (marijuana) themselves," Farrell says.