DID S.D. POLICE KILL CHUCK HUNDLEY?

Marijuana Activists Confront City, Each Other

"I have a disease which is an incurable disease," medicinal marijuana user
Chuck Hundley told the San Diego City Council July 27, three weeks after
the Shelter from the Storm cannabis growing co-op was raided by city
narcotics police and his plants were seized. "It has many symptoms,
including lupus, arthritis and Renaud's phenomenon. There is no
pharmaceutical company that produces a drug that can cure me when I have an
attack. Look at my hand coloring. I get extremely swollen. My blood
circulation nearly stops. Marijuana actually can, within five to 15
minutes, stop the rapid onset of an attack. It's a vascular dilator. It's
the only thing that can cure an attack."

Five weeks later, Chuck Hundley died and surviving members of Shelter from
the Storm are blaming his death on the San Diego Police Department and its
refusal to allow medicinal marijuana users to grow and use the substance in
peace without harassment. Club member Barbara MacKenzie told Zenger' s that
Hundley had already gone through the criminal justice system once before,
and at his sentencing hearing "his lawyer recommended to him, right there
in the courtroom ... that he go ahead and grow with us, because that would
be... the safest and most legal" way he could obtain marijuana.

MacKenzie and her co-founder of Shelter from the Storm, Steve McWilliams,
are still looking for a way they can obtain marijuana and still be within
the San Diego city and county authorities' narrow interpretation of
Proposition 215, the landmark medical-marijuana initiative California
voters passed in November 1996. After their eviction from the Hillcrest
facility where the July 6 police raid took place, they settled in a new
location in Kearny Mesa and, with a volunteer consultant, worked out a plan
for what they called a "surrogate nursery" in which they would grow plants
for clients. But there, too, they've run into landlord problems and even if
they can find a permanent location, the local, state and federal political
climate will continue to work against them.

According to a letter they recently received from the office of San Diego
police chief Dave Bejarano, city police followed the department's
guidelines on Proposition 215 when they raided Shelter's Hillcrest location
on July 6. ("That's news to us," MacKenzie told Zenger's. "For months
they've been telling us they don't have any guidelines.") San Diego County
District Attorney Paul Pfingst, who is still considering prosecuting
McWilliams based on his July 6 arrest, has stated flatly that he doesn't
consider a growing co-op to be legitimate under Proposition 215. The
recommendations of the state task force convened by California Attorney
General Bill Lockyer which, ironically, were issued just one day before
McWilliams was arrested and his group's plants seized won't be implemented
this year, partly because Governor Gray Davis threatened to veto the
legislation containing them and partly because law-enforcement officials
and medical-marijuana advocates didn't agree on whether patients should be
allowed or required to register with the government as medicinal marijuana
users to receive the substance legally.

Above all, there rests the 900-pound gorilla of the federal government,
which has consistently claimed that their laws making marijuana completely
illegal for any purpose take precedence over Proposition 215 and the other
six state medical-marijuana initiatives approved by voters in Arizona,
Alaska, Hawai'i, Oregon, Washington and Colorado. One of the few pieces of
good news recently received by California medical-marijuana advocates,
however, was a September 13 ruling by a federal appeals court in San
Francisco that partially overturned a judge's order closing down a
medical-marijuana dispensary in Oakland. The appeals court told federal
district judge Charles Breyer, who issued the injunction against the club,
that he should consider granting the club the right to dispense marijuana
to patients who would "suffer serious harm if they are denied cannabis
[marijuana]."

This would significantly narrow the number of patients for whom medical
marijuana would be available, but it may be the best available outcome in
the current political climate. It's also the route taken by Americans for
Medical Rights, which sponsored six state medical-marijuana initiatives
that made it to the ballot and passed in the 1998 election. Unlike
Proposition 215, these initiatives limited access to patients suffering
from one of five conditions: side effects from cancer chemotherapy, wasting
syndrome from AIDS, epilepsy and other seizure disorders, multiple
sclerosis and other spastic disorders, and glaucoma. It's not clear whether
Chuck Hundley's unusual health problems would have fit under these
criteria, but these stricter laws seem to be heading in the direction of
the federal appeals court that carefully carved out a potential exception,
for a handful of very sick people, to the U.S. government's total prohibition.

Ironically, while marijuana distribution centers throughout the state have
been forced to close down, the California Alternative Medicinal Center
(CAMC) on Fourth Avenue in Hillcrest has continued to operate since its
inception in 1997 even though it openly sells marijuana on premises, which
McWilliams has been told is illegal. McWilliams and other members of his
group have become increasingly jealous of the CAMC's ability to operate
while his own organization has been shut down at least twice and has
accused the city and CAMC of being in collusion to give CAMC a monopoly on
medicinal marijuana distribution in San Diego.

McWilliams and other Shelter from the Storm members took these allegations
to the street last August 19, when they staged a demonstration outside CAMC
headquarters. 'The main issue is that there is unequal protection under the
law," MacKenzie told CAMC founder and president Carolyn Smith Konow during
the protest. "If you're going to be here, then we should be allowed to do
the same thing. We should be allowed not to have the police come in, raid
us and destroy or patients' plants. That is totally unconscionable, and for
the police to ignore or to sanction this place, and at the same time
persecute patients [who grow their own], is a statement on San Diego that I
don't want to see and I'm sure you don't want to see also."

"There was a reason that the police came to see you, obviously, because
they don't just come for no reason," Konow replied. "I don't have any idea.
I wasn't at your organization. We've been working with the city, and
they're very happy with what we're doing. I don't know what we're doing
differently than we are." Konow, who served on Lockyer's statewide task
force, said that one of its recommendations 'is that the local law
enforcements have to use their own judgments. And that's what they've done
in San Diego."