CLARITY SOUGHT ON RULES FOR POT USE

City Council Wants Answers Soon On Medical Marijuana

Sick and dying people who use marijuana under a doctor's advice to ease
their symptoms shouldn't have to worry about being arrested, the San Diego
City Council said yesterday.

"They need to be able to feel not like criminals," said Councilwoman
Valerie Stallings.

Council members passed a resolution urging District Attorney Paul Pfingst
to speed up work on guidelines for police throughout San Diego clarifying
who can use marijuana for medical purposes and under what circumstances.

The guidelines are meant to implement Proposition 215, the 1996 ballot
measure that legalized the medical use of marijuana.

"We need to expedite this. We need to make something happen," Stallings said.

Mayor Susan Golding said she expected the district attorney's work group to
complete its recommendations by October or November.

But Deputy District Attorney Dave Lattuca, who heads the work group,
declined to say when the recommendations would be finished.

"It is a work in progress," Lattuca said.

Stallings, who underwent surgery and chemotherapy for breast cancer in
1996, has said she didn't use marijuana to ease her symptoms but she knew
others who had.

"I've been there in that kind of pain so I feel a little more pressure,"
Stallings said.

At the urging of Councilwoman Christine Kehoe and more than a dozen medical
marijuana activists, the council asked Pfingst to add doctors and medical
marijuana patients to his Medical Marijuana Work Group, which is developing
those guidelines.

Medical marijuana activist Steve McWilliams said the council action was "a
massive step forward."

McWilliams and several other medical marijuana advocates have addressed the
council at nearly every meeting for almost a year urging the city to take
action to implement Proposition 215.

Several marijuana patients in the audience applauded following the council
vote.

"This will hopefully open the doors," McWilliams said. Until now, he said,
marijuana activists and physicians have been left out of discussions on how
to implement Proposition 215.

The work group includes representatives of city police, the District
Attorney's Office and the City Attorney's Office, Lattuca said. He said
Pfingst would take the council's recommendation to expand the work group
under advisement.

City officials said Proposition 215 was ambiguous on how much marijuana
someone could legally possess and how they could get it.

The council, as part of its resolution, called for the Legislature and the
Attorney General's Office to clarify the matter. The council also
instructed city police to keep statistics on the medical use of marijuana
in San Diego.

San Diego police so far have interpreted the law to mean that sick people
or their caretakers could grow small amounts of marijuana under a doctor's
instructions to ease pain and other medical symptoms, said Deputy City
Attorney Paul Cooper.

But under the city police interpretation, the law does not allow
cooperatives of cannabis clubs to grow, sell or give away marijuana for
sick and dying people to use.

Kehoe said the guidelines being developed by the district attorney should
allow cooperatives or provide some other way for sick people to obtain
marijuana besides growing it themselves or having their caretaker grow it
for them.

Council members Juan Vargas and Judy McCarty emphasized that the council
wasn't advocating the general use of marijuana.

"We don't want our kids to think it's all right to go out and smoke
marijuana," Vargas said.