MARIJUANA LAW SPROUTS HARVEST OF QUESTIONS

Prop. 215, the California initiative that legalized marijuana for medicinal
purposes, can be found on the Internet at
http//vote96.ss.ca.gov/Vote96/html/BP/215text.htm

If you're cyber-literate and curious, you can click over and skim the text.
Even if you flunked out of Evelyn Woods' speed-reading academy, this will
take all of 10 minutes.

If that sounds like too much time, you're in luck. In 10 seconds, I can
capture the essence of the Compassionate Use Act of 1996

It's the legal equivalent of Torrey Pines Golf Course. Lots of hazards,
lots of holes.

The initiative forbids the prosecution of "seriously ill" citizens who
obtain and use marijuana as part of their treatment. For humanitarian
reasons, the measure was tough to oppose, and it passed by a landslide,
with a 1-million-vote plurality.

For common sense reasons, though, the law is proving almost impossible to
implement.

Where can patients buy marijuana? The act doesn't say (Rite Aid does not
stock a cannabis aisle.)

Will doctors recommend marijuana to patients? Sometimes.

In writing? Rarely.

"We have to deal with a poorly written law," sighed William Aaron.

He should know -- although he's no lawyer or narcotics detective. Nor is he
one of the law's opponents. Aaron's criticisms are notable because he is
operations director of California Alternative Medicinal Center (CAMC).

Marijuana is his business, and business has never been weirder.

High and low

In San Diego, the medicinal pot trade is dominated by two players, CAMC and
Shelter from the Storm. Relations between the two enterprises are
distinctly unmellow.

In an Irving Gill-designed house in Banker's Hill, CAMC sells marijuana to
clients who have been referred by a doctor. The tidy, home-like rooms reek
of respectability.

"He has no business license," Aaron snipes at Steve McWilliams, Shelter
from the Storm's free-spirited founder. "He has no California driver's
license."

"I think they're in collusion with the district attorney's office,"
McWilliams shoots back.

McWilliams doesn't sell anything. Instead, he raises marijuana plants for
patients who pay for water, fertilizer and help cover the rent. Or at
least, that was the arrangement -- Shelter's landlord, uncomfortable to
find his tenant running a weed co-op, ordered McWilliams out by Friday.

The rival groups agree, though, that marijuana is a pharmaceutical wonder.
Shelter's list of "chronic conditions reported treated with cannabis" is
topped by "Persistent Insomnia." It concludes, 155 maladies later, with
"Color Blindness."

And both agree that Prop. 215 was written in gray ink. There's nothing
black and white about it.

Take the case of Matt Schumsky, whose motorcycle racing days left him with
arthritic bones. His doctor at Kaiser approved marijuana for pain relief,
but that didn't stop El Cajon police from arresting Schumsky for
cultivating plants.

One-hundred and sixty of them.

Most, Schumsky insists, were seedlings that would never flower -- and,
thus, would never be usable. But the officer maintained Schumsky could not
legally possess even one bud.

Actually, Prop. 215 allows patients or caregivers to grow marijuana "for
the personal medical purposes of the patient . . . "

But how many plants? The law doesn't say.

What if?

Rather than making marijuana legal for the desperately ill, this
"compassionate" law has entered the drug in a game of
make-it-up-as-we-go-along.

Three years into this experiment, patients still don't know how much
marijuana is legal -- and how much is an invitation to a bust. "That's what
we're focused on, the 'what if?' " Aaron said. "What if a client who has
just gotten his medical cannabis gets stopped by a cop?"

Don't look to the law for any answers. Prop. 215, ambiguous? Let's just say
it makes "Finnegan's Wake" look like "Dick and Jane."