SACRAMENT OR SACRILEGE?

Marijuana Ministry Pits Church Against Law

WALLACE -- For members of Northern Lights Church in Calaveras County,
the already hazy lines between religion, medicine and politics
intersected at minister Sue Garner's front door at 9 a.m. Aug. 2.

Garner found herself lying face first on the front porch in a T-shirt
and underwear as masked sheriff's deputies pointed guns at her head,
she said.

Along with her husband, minister Rick Garner, and their 15-year-old
son, Garner said she was handcuffed and marched past a screened-in
sanctuary in the yard, where deputies were destroying almost 300
potted marijuana plants.

They also were desecrating a church, fellow Northern Lights minister
David Jack said.

"This sacrilege was worse than rape," Jack said. "I was just sickened.
They were putting us out of business as a religion."

The church, next door to Garner's house, cultivates medicinal cannabis
for ill parishioners in accordance with Proposition 215, he says.
Northern Lights is considering legal action while the district
attorney weighs the evidence.

It's just the latest conflict sprouting from the ambiguity of
Proposition 215, which permits people suffering from certain medical
conditions to use marijuana with a doctor's approval.

Picked apart by the courts and challenged by the federal government,
the 1996 Compassionate Use Initiative got a boost last month when a
federal judge cleared the way for an Oakland dispensary to provide
cannabis for people who face "imminent harm" from a medical condition.

Jack also considers marijuana a holy sacrament, an ancillary First
Amendment argument that further clouds the medical rights debate. It's
another pitfall for law enforcement charged with protecting a
community from what's either a social menace, an alternative drug
treatment or a spiritual pathway used even in Bible times.

Thomas Roberts, author of "Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments: An
Entheogen Chrestomathy," says the government's war on drugs becomes trapped
in a religious debate.

"And of all the swamps, that's the hardest one to get stuck in,"
Roberts said.

At its Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in March, even The Religious
Society of Friends chastised the federal government's violent drug war
for hurting the economy and for "the curtailment of civil liberties
and the demonizing of 'enemies.' "

Eric Sterling, a Quaker and a former congressional aide who helped
author some of the anti-drug laws of the 1980s, is rethinking his
society's historical prohibitionist view of narcotics, including
medical cases.

"I could see a church (like Northern Lights) saying, 'We're the last
people who want to see drug abuse in the community,' " said Sterling,
president of Criminal Justice Policy Foundation in Washington, D.C.

During the church raid, Jack said, authorities confiscated financial
documents and parishioners' private medical records, sullied the
church's name in a conservative community and deprived some 20
patients of their only legal, organically safe supply of marijuana.

However, Calaveras County Sheriff Dennis Downum said members of this
dubious "church" are getting more than a medical or spiritual high.

"You're going to see a lot of horrendous contradictions and people
trying to distance themselves from the (church)," Downum predicted. "I
think it was a front for a marijuana operation."

Confusing law

The Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church, which has faced legal battles over
its marijuana sacrament, describes religion, politics and commerce as
the "three unclean spirits which separate the people from their God."

Regarding Proposition 215, however, "(The law) just wants to separate
the good guys from the bad guys," Nathan Barankin of the California
attorney general's office said. "It's very complicated."

Downum is frustrated by a "horribly written" law that he said leaves
law enforcement wide open to trouble.

That's why state Sen. John Vasconcellos, D-Santa Clara, is
spearheading a bill to clean up the law's vague language, spokesman
Rand Martin said.

Jack sees Northern Lights as a "caregiver" under Proposition 215. But
in the bill, the term applies to individuals or skilled-nursing
facilities, Martin said. Churches have a better chance of being
recognized by the state as a "cooperative" growing marijuana, if
anything, Martin said.

The bill would create a statewide registry for medicinal marijuana
users carrying an identification card -- "a get-out-of-jail-free
card," as Martin puts it, like those distributed by some Bay Area
dispensaries.

Such uniformity would ensure that Proposition 215 is implemented and
enforced in San Francisco the same as it is in more conservative areas
like Stockton, Martin said.

"They're more keenly tuned to drug problems (in the Central Valley),
because they're the centerpiece ... of the drug-growing culture.
They're more suspect of individual's claiming (Proposition) 215 as a
defense," Martin said.

But the church raid smacked of religious politics, according to
Jack.

"We had nothing to hide," Jack said.

Jack points to a Calaveras County counsel letter noting that the
"private sector" could freely operate a dispensary, and also to a sign
at the front gate of the church compound that identifies the operation.

Downum and Jack both sit on a medical-marijuana task force established
by the county Board of Supervisors. Last week, Jack objected to a
personal-use limit endorsed by Downum and the task force.

Downum said: "You have to do more than provide drugs (to be a church).
There were no pews. Basically there was a set of drums and a whole
bunch of marijuana plants."

The sheriff says it's his duty to serve constituents who moved to
Calaveras County to escape urban crime and drugs. He'll "plead guilty"
to having a traditional view of church -- he says he'd be more shocked
and offended if Northern Lights was a Baptist church with a steeple.

"I don't have to defend my religion to anybody," said minister Rick
Garner, who uses marijuana to relieve his rheumatoid arthritis. "We're
not Rastafarians dancing around the fire naked, jacked up on some
chemical and using the Constitution as an excuse."

Founded in January, Northern Lights is affiliated with the
interdenominational Universal Life Church in Modesto. Jack adheres to
The Urantia Book, an anthology of 196 "papers" on science, philosophy
and theology, mysteriously compiled by supernatural beings, followers
believe. The 2,000-page book discounts such biblical doctrine as
original sin and atonement.

A congregation of 20 to 40 people has held church services in homes,
at parks and at the Wallace compound.

But Jack has suspended services to protect its nerve-wracked
parishioners. The church now exists only on a Web page, where Jack
posts sermons.

"We're going to resolve this. Our faith will survive," Jack reassured
a parishioner one recent afternoon during a visit to his home.

"Richard" said he has two small organic cannabis plants that will last
him through Christmas if the church folds. His Catholic family was
aghast when he started using cannabis six years ago to treat his
multiple sclerosis.

"The marijuana plant has (spiritual) powers. It's a magic plant," he
said.

Not to neighbor Robert LaCasse, who anonymously circulated a letter
criticizing the church.

"These are not religious people on a mission for the disabled," said
LaCasse, 49, of Valley Springs.

He said parishioners have threatened him for complaining and boasted
about turning a profit.

"People will always focus on the rare (medical) cases to justify the
broad use of it, ... to further their agenda and legalize marijuana,"
LaCasse said.

Jack said he carefully screens patients, who use marijuana because
their conventional medicine has proved ineffective or induced harmful
side effects. Many are too sick to travel to Bay Area dispensaries,
where cannabis is expensive, in limited supply and sometimes tainted.

"We preach that it's not safe to smoke it," said Jack, who spreads
cannabis butter on his morning toast to maintain his balance weakened
by a brain stem tumor.

He shows patients how to use a vaporizer to inhale the drug crystals
or how to ingest the drug.

Last week Jack stopped by "Heather's" house with a cannabis cookbook.
Heather bought some contaminated marijuana on a Stockton street corner
last year, a last resort for her soft-tissue disease. She voted
against Proposition 215 in 1996.

"People who are in pain need to be ministered to. The desperation
cannot even be described," said Heather, raised Baptist. "The church
is understanding."

Ancient custom

Marijuana's place in religion is much older than its trip through the
court of law or public consciousness.

Roberts says the role of psychoactive drugs in religious rites is
evident in Hindu Sanskrit writings from 3000 B.C., when "soma" was
gleaned from a mushroom, and in ancient Greece, where the ergot fungus
used on religious pilgrimages was later discovered as LSD.

Legislation signed by President Clinton in 1994 restored the Native
American Church's use of the cactus-extract peyote in religious ceremonies.

Some people still consider cannabis a God-given source of protein-rich
food, clothing, paper and medicine -- here the boundaries of
government and religion blur.

"It's all medical and spiritual, ultimately," John Stahl of Mendocino
County said.

Taking LSD allows Stahl to "see God ... in a profound religious
experience," while marijuana relieves his joint pains. Marijuana also
eased his wife's suffering before she died of cancer, he said.

Stahl said law enforcement tolerates his loosely organized Church of
the Living Tree, where 10 people living on a 65-acre compound work to
preserve trees by pounding out paper products from hemp fiber.

The son and grandson of Methodist ministers, Stahl no longer attends
formal church services.

"I'm at church all the time -- it's in the garden and trees around
me," he said.

No religious experience is authentic if it requires a drug to alter
the senses, said the Rev. Ralph Silva of Stockton.

"We don't allow anything other than the Holy Spirit to control us,"
said Silva, who pastors Berea Baptist Church of Morada. "We are
complete in Jesus."

Robert Schmidt had a drug-free religious experience. It actually drove
him out of a Pentecostal church after God gave him a vision of his
life's mission, he claims.

The vision came to fruition two years ago. Schmidt opened a nonprofit
organization in Petaluma that grows some 50 marijuana plants for about
200 patients and provides for Bay Area cannabis clubs and several
hospitals and hospices he won't name.

His cannabis operation is called Genesis 1:29, where God tells Adam and
Eve: "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole Earth. ..."

Schmidt dropped out of Marin Christian Life Bible College in Novato in
1987 after people spurned his questions about marijuana references in
the Bible.

Likewise, the Coptic Church claims the Old Testament Israelites and
Jesus and his disciples used cannabis.

It says numerous passages about incense, clouds and smoke were
mistranslated in a conspiracy by the Catholic Church and Western
governments.

For example, the root words for "reed" or "hemp" in Exodus Chapter 30
were erroneously transcribed as "sweet cane," the church says.

"It's utter nonsense," said the Rev. Michael Guinan, a priest from the
Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley and a 1956 graduate of St.
Mary's High School in Stockton. "I've been teaching Hebrew 30 years,
and I've never seen anything on marijuana in the Bible."

Guinan said the Coptics botched both the word and the translation in
Exodus -- it really means "measuring stick."

Schmidt admits his own drug history has been less than holy. He
smuggled dope from South America and nearly overdosed on several occasions.

Today he uses marijuana only to relieve a "black lung" condition from
his years as a shipyard welder.

One possible way to separate the wheat from the chaff is for
seminaries or religious orders to train clergy to screen and educate
candidates for medicinal marijuana, Roberts suggests.

Until then, "(People) are just going to have to take it in faith that
I am firm in the fear of God," Schmidt said. "Get over it. The Old Man
made (cannabis). We are good stewards of what God provides."