SAN FRANCISCO'S POLITICAL POTBOILER

In Fight Over Marijuana as Medicine, Sheriff Backs Growers

LOS ANGELES, April 16—In most cities, a Superior Court judge's order to
local law enforcement officials to shut down an illegal marijuana
cultivators' club would seem to be enough to get the job done. But not
necessarily so in freewheeling San Francisco.

Both the county sheriff and the district attorney in San Francisco are
outspokenly in favor of legalized marijuana for medicinal use. The director
of the health department has even suggested having city health workers
distribute the drug to patients who need it for relief of pain.

San Francisco's reputation as a municipal iconoclast and proving ground for
unconventional ideas got a major boost today when County Sheriff Michael
Hennessey refused to padlock the controversial Cannabis Cultivators' Club
as ordered Wednesday by Superior Court Judge David Garcia.

"I feel that many people benefit from medical marijuana and that this
organization provides a valuable service," Hennessey said in a telephone
interview. "I don't know if they did step over the line, but no official in
San Francisco, including me, wants to put them out of business," added
Hennessey, a Democrat who has been elected to the county's top law
enforcement job five times.

The sheriff said the city attorney's office, which itself has already sued
the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to prevent it from punishing
physicians who recommend marijuana for medicinal use, interpreted Garcia's
order as giving him the option of declining to shut down the club and
turning that responsibility over to the state Bureau of Narcotics
Enforcement. But Hennessey said he will not even ask the state drug agency
to act in his place, as provided for in the court's order, and instead will
attempt to negotiate a settlement with the court in which the cannabis club
could remain open.

Even if the sheriff's deputies or state narcotics agents did move against
the club, the task of prosecuting its operators would fall to District
Attorney Terence Hallinan, a self-described "Old Prog" who long has
advocated decriminalizing marijuana and who has said, "We're all together
on wanting to make [medical marijuana] work in San Francisco."

The year-long legal battle over the use of medical marijuana, which
California voters approved in a 1996 referendum, came to a head when Garcia
ordered the immediate closure of the cannabis club, which was founded by
oft-busted pot dealer Dennis Peron.

Garcia, basing his decision on an appellate court ruling last December,
said that the 1996 ballot initiative allows only patients and their
immediate caregivers to cultivate and possess marijuana. The judge said
that the law does not allow clubs like Peron's to sell or give marijuana to
other clubs or caregivers, as Peron admitted his outlet was doing.

Garcia's "nuisance abatement order" calls for either the San Francisco
County Sheriff's Department or the state Bureau of Narcotics to close
Peron's psychedelically decorated downtown emporium immediately and seize
its contents. But complicating the order is the fact that the club is also
the headquarters for Peron's maverick campaign for the Republican
nomination for governor -- and that his opponent in the June 2 primary is
Attorney General Dan Lungren, who is the Republican frontrunner in the
gubernatorial race.

Lungren, a law-and-order conservative who has long opposed efforts to
legalize marijuana, said if Hennessey fails to act against the club, he will.

"We will make sure the court's injunction is enforced," Matt Ross,
Lungren's press secretary, said today, thereby setting the stage for the
attorney general being forced to shut down his primary rival's campaign
headquarters. Ross declined to say when state narcotics officers plan to
move against the cannabis club.

Peron, whose club was closed by Lungren's narcotics agents for five months
in 1996 before the statewide referendum allowed it to reopen, remained
defiant as ever. "If they want to pull another Waco here, let them bring in
the state narcs. We're not closing down this place," said Peron, referring
to the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex., by federal
law enforcement officers.

Peron said that about a dozen sufferers of AIDS and cancer are living in
the cannabis club and that a raid by state narcotics agents will only
result in the spectacle of emaciated and terminally ill patients being
forcibly removed from their beds.

In a long-shot effort aimed at circumventing the court order, Peron said he
dissolved the Cannabis Cultivators' Club last night and renamed it the San
Francisco Cannabis Healing Center, located in the same five-story building
near City Hall and staffed by the same volunteers.

"We'll redecorate it, and if they want to come and arrest the building,
they can do that. They're just the same old spoiled sports who opposed the
ballot initiative and want to defeat it with a technicality," Peron said.

© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company