News Focus: NEW LEAF FOR POT CLUB

Law: Since the convictions of the co-op's leaders, the advice is 'grow your
own.'

The marijuana plants grow stocky and strong in Marvin Chavez's garden.
Along the fence, beside the shed. Leaves green. Buds firm. Stalks sturdy.

Chavez squeezes a bud tenderly as it basks in the warm morning light. This,
he says, is his medicine. And the law lets him alone.

"I'm here, standing up for my rights," he said. "I'm expecting the worst.
But my spirit is strong."

Chavez is the man who was found guilty last week on three felony counts of
selling or transporting marijuana.

And yes, Chavez is the still-zealous founder of the Orange County Patient,
Doctor, Nurse Support Group, the local "cannabis club" that popped up after
Proposition 215 passed in 1996 and has been foundering since his arrest.

"I'm under a court order not to hand out medicine to patients," said
Chavez, who will be sentenced in January and faces up to eight years in
prison. "And I'm abiding by that court order. But the organization will
still operate in its own way."

Two things have become very clear in the wake of Chavez's case: how
patients can legally obtain marijuana under Prop. 215, and how they can't,
at least as far as the Orange County District Attorney's Office is concerned.

One cannot distribute baggies of marijuana marked with "RX" in exchange for
"donations." That is a marijuana sale under California law, and selling
marijuana is illegal.

But one can grow one's own marijuana, if one has a doctor's recommendation
to use the drug.

When Chavez was arrested for distributing the marijuana and taking the
donations, police and prosecutors knew of the backyard garden at his Santa
Ana home. But they did nothing about that.

"He was arrested twice, once by us and once by the Garden Grove Police
Department," said retired prosecutor Carl Armbrust, who won the convictions
against Chavez. "They called me up and said, 'Mr. Chavez has 14 or so
marijuana plants growing! What should we do with them?'

"And I said, 'Leave them.' Because he's entitled to them," Armbrust said.
"He is a patient and had a doctor's authorization, and under the 215 law,
he's entitled to them."

Chavez, who says he suffers from severe back pain, began crusading for
Prop. 215 months before it passed. After it succeeded, he filed fictitious
business names for the co-op, got it a business license and worked to
familiarize people with the new law. At its height, the co-op had more than
200 members.

But now, some of the co-op's pagers have been disconnected. Even before the
Chavez verdict, co-op volunteer David Herricks was convicted on more
serious charges. And co-op co-director Jack Shachter goes to trial next month.

People, afraid, are returning to the black market, where it's hard to know
exactly what they're getting.

"We have real concerns about quality," said Ana Boyce, the Mission Viejo
nurse who helped write Prop.215. The co-op is dedicated to the memory of
her late husband, J.J., who died of cancer in 1995.

"The co-op will continue," she vowed. "To be safe, there won't be any money
exchanges at all. We're trying to encourage people to grow their own."

But that's not so easy.

Shirley Reaves, a director of the co-op who suffers from spinal problems,
lives in an apartment in Chico. She shares the garden area with her
neighbors and certainly can't grow marijuana there. "My only option is to
grow indoors, and I don't have the facilities or the technology or the
knowledge to do that," she said.

"My health has been really bad since Marvin's arrest," she said. "I haven't
been able to get any marijuana."

Chavez's attorneys will appeal his convictions on the ground that the judge
did not allow them to mount a defense under Prop. 215. Attorney James Silva
called Orange County officials "strict constructionists" when it comes to
the medical marijuana law.

"Of all the counties where there has been open distribution of medical
marijuana, Orange County has elected to address it with an iron fist," said
attorney J. David Nick, Silva's partner on the case. "The DA's office is
doing anything and everything it can to make sure this law is narrowed down
to the size of a needle's eye."

Armbrust has heard it all before.

"In Orange County, our DA has always been pretty hard-line as far as what
the law is," Armbrust said. "We don't bend the rules. I don't want to say
we're 'zero tolerance,' but pretty close to zero tolerance."

Armbrust tells a story from very early in his career. Aman was on trial for
a traffic violation. Running a stop sign. Armbrust put the officer who
wrote the ticket on the stand. Did the man stop at all? Armbrust asked.
"Yes," the officer said. "He stopped 1 foot over the line." Armbrust,
incredulous, blurted out something he is far to seasoned to say today: "You
gave him a ticket for stopping 1 foot over the line?" And the officer said
something Armbrust has never forgotten: "The line is the line. The law is
the law."

It's the same line of argument the medical marijuana advocates plan to use.

"Eventually, the will of the people will prevail, and the government will
concede and realize this is medicine," Boyce said.

Checked-by: Richard Lake