DISCREET MEDICAL MARIJUANA PROVIDERS NOT TO BE PURSUED

Marijuana providers who quietly continued to dispense medical pot following
last year's crackdown, on Saturday applauded Attorney General Bill Lockyer's
announcement that he would not interfere with their practice as long as they
operated discreetly. "If local law enforcement is supportive of
implementation of Proposition 215, and their policies don't provoke outside
prosecution, I have no intention of intervening," Lockyer, a Democrat who
supported the 1996 ballot initiative to legalize pot for medical use, said
Friday in San Francisco following a meeting with City officials.

When U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ordered San Francisco's high-profile
Cannabis Cultivators Club shut down last year, it raised concerns among
those in need of medical marijuana that they would have to wait out court
appeals before they could resume receiving pot.

In reality, most were not long without a joint.

Jane Weirick was one of those who leaped into the void to help those she
felt were in need.

"We were seeing people who couldn't wait until this was sorted out in
court," said Weirick, 39, who had worked with the Cannabis Cultivators Club
in The City. "We were seeing people get very sick, even dying, as they
waited for their medicine."

Weirick helped found Compassion On Wheels, and began distributing marijuana
door-to-door to 250 of the neediest patients.

"These were the ones that were the sickest, who were the least able to get
out of their homes to score pot for themselves," she said. "There was no way
they were going to be able to head to Dolores Park without becoming the
victims of a crime."

Weirick also found that her clientele needed more than just marijuana.

"This isn't just about smoking pot. One of the things the club provided was
a place where people suffering through similar pain could meet and discuss
their illnesses, or just socialize," she said. "Now when we deliver the
marijuana, most of the people ask us to stay, have some tea, some
conversation, some human contact. That is such an important element of what
we do."

Rich Evans also barely blinked following the crackdown. With zero publicity,
he began providing marijuana to 1,000 patients out of a Mission Street
storefront.

"We didn't have a Web page or anything like that," said Evans, 35. "This is
all strictly word of mouth. That's part of trying to keep things low key, as
well as using a smaller building than the old club. But also there's no real
need to jump into the media spotlight."

One of the main differences between Evans' distribution center and the
former Cannabis Cultivators Club is that there is little, if any, smoking on
the premises. And while Weirick stressed the social aspects of a marijuana
club, Evans was of two minds.

"I think that medical marijuana should be fun, that's true," he said. "But I
also think that people should become more independent. At the old place,
people would just hang around and smoke, and once it closed it was as if
they were lost, without a place to go. People should be capable of meeting
their own social needs.

"And frankly," Evans added with a laugh, "the old atmosphere was getting
kind of seedy. I think I'm turning into a Republican or something."

As for the future, Weirick has been working with others toward opening the
Patients Resource Center, which would not only provide marijuana to those
who need it but serve as more of a clinic.

"We're trying to get away from that whole 'club' identification," admitted
Weirick. "The television cameras would come in and focus on the one guy in
tie-dye who looked like he was there for a hangnail and just having a blast.
The resource center would help patients with other needs and also work
closely with doctors and other researchers who wanted to study the effects
of marijuana on any number of medical conditions."

District Attorney Terence Hallinan said he liked the idea of the resource
center, yet didn't offer much hope of The City contributing much funding.

"Anything that stresses the medical and research elements of marijuana
distribution is on the right track," Hallinan said. "But on the other hand,
San Francisco has to be very careful about not putting anything right in the
face of the federal government, and contributing city funds to something
like this at this time would probably provoke them.

"I think that right now people do have access to medical marijuana in San
Francisco, but it is all being done underground, and not helping as many
people as it ideally should. But I prefer to take the long-range view of
things, and unfortunately, they have to keep their heads down right now."

Dennis Peron, co-author of Prop. 215 and founder of the Cannabis Cultivators
Club, was supportive of Lockyer's statements, as far as they went.

"I support the guy," Peron said of Lockyer, "and I hope to work with him.
But what good is it if we don't have uniformity throughout the state? Does
this mean you're lucky if you get cancer in San Francisco but you're unlucky
if you're sick in Orange County?"

The U.S. attorney's office declined to comment on Lockyer's statement that
quiet pot distribution probably would not spark federal prosecution.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.