NOT-SO-SECRET FARM KEEPS GROWING

MIDDLETON - If the Lake County Cannabis Cultivation Project is
difficult to find, it's not because anybody is trying to keep it a
secret.

A giant red canvas banner proclaiming "Medical Marijuana" beckons
motorists, and a World Wide Web site and steady stream of faxed news
releases keep everyone - including law enforcement agencies - updated
on the 20-acre farm's doings. After all, those growing and providing
marijuana to visitors and Bay Area residents believe their operation is
completely
legal.

"We're trying to show what you can do under the law without any
trouble or dispute," says John Entwistle, a legislative advocate,
spokesman, amateur horticulturist and chief bottle washer for
Californians for Compassionate Use, which runs the farm.

The distinctive smell of burning marijuana wafts from inside a house
where people are smoking in the living room, sitting amid memorabilia
of years of pro-marijuana activism. Some are in wheelchairs like Sandi
Patrick, who suffers paralysis and other ailments from a car accident.
They smoke intermittently all day or !eat cake baked with
marijuana-spiked butter.

Pam McConnell of Clear Lake says she has struggled with mental illness
for many years.

During one of her frequent hospital stays, a niece found her too
medicated to walk straight.

So McConnell quit taking the hospital's medicine and smoked a joint
her niece gave her.

Nurses and doctors remarked on her rapid improvement and discharged
her a few days later.

Eighteen years later, she has been hospitalized only once, when she
ran out of marijuana for a few days.

"I'm functional, I'm sitting here talking to you instead of up in St.
Helena with my thumb in my mouth," she says. I'm not doing anything
wrong. I'm taking care of myself, keeping myself alive."

In two hothouses on the farm, $300 sodium lamps radiate the heat and
light the plants crave, while fans blow a constant breeze to strengthen the
growing stalks. Entwistle carries the plants onto the porch and
tenderly bathes each one with a garden hose, moving stalk by stalk,
top to bottom, washing away parasites that could stunt growth.

Just before the plants mature, they are sexed. Female plants produce
blossoms that are dried and smoked; male plants are ground and used in
cooking or poultices.

Entwistle says buyers pay only for the labor - about $50 for a plant
that will yield roughly two ounces of smokeable weed, after budding in
a patient's bathtub or closet.

"We're really proud of this. He's not going to have to do anything
with this," Entwistle says. caressing the leaves of a plant ready for
shipping. "All you need to make this plant into medicine now is one I
light."

As nine plants are loaded ' into Entwistle speaks of distributing
marijuana like an old-fashioned milkman by making weekly deliveries
customers along a route.

Lake County Sheriff Rod says the farm isn't his highest priority. If he
finds farmers overstepping their legal bounds, he will act. Otherwise,
he will sit tight.

Somebody needs to Say these are the standards," he said. "There is
nothing under that law that gives a standard. There is no number of
plants, there is no plant-to patient ratio, there is nothing."

So the minivan uneventfully passes a few police cars while wending
through wine country, and the marijuana-scented group gets only a few
odd looks when it stops at a Taco Bell in Napa.

Later, on a darkened Berkeley street, Dennis Peron shakes his head at
the cloak-and-dagger feel of handing plants over a wooden slat fence
to a member of a local ring of medicinal users.

"Clandestine meeting in the middle of the night," says the flamboyant
former head of San Francisco cannabis club. "I drove 100 miles to hand
these over a fence. Something's not right."