DA TO PROPOSE POT CLUB ALTERNATIVE FOR S.F.

SAN FRANCISCO -- San Francisco's prosecutor is getting ready to tell a
judge that if federal authorities' efforts to close Bay Area medical
marijuana clubs are successful, city workers might distribute pot to those
who most desperately need it.

As a last resort, city health officials and police might have to run
marijuana distribution centers for seriously ill patients in order to
combat a rise in street-level drug dealing, District Attorney Terence
Hallinan said in a draft copy of a brief made available on Monday.

Dick Iglehart, Hallinan's chief assistant, said the brief will be filed
within a week with U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, who was given formal
notice Friday that it is coming.

In the meantime, other cities and counties are being asked to sign the
document. It has been circulated to city councils in Oakland, Fairfax and
Santa Cruz, and to boards of supervisors in Marin and Mendocino counties.

All of those communities have marijuana clubs that the federal government
has moved to shut down for violating the federal Controlled Substances Act.
Breyer has scheduled a hearing in the government's case for March 24.

Federal officials have been at odds with local officials in some Bay Area
communities since passage of the 1996 medical marijuana initiative, the
statewide measure legalizing pot-growing and distribution for seriously ill
patients.

Federal officials have asked Breyer to issue civil injunctions that would
bar the operation of six clubs, about one-third of those operating in the
state. The clubs have opposed those injunctions.

Hallinan's draft friend-of-the-court brief stakes out a compromise position
of sorts.

It argues that if Breyer enjoins the clubs, he should not enjoin everything
they do. It urges the judge to let the clubs continue distributing
marijuana to ease "the excruciating suffering of people whose bodies are
wasting away from AIDS or cancer therapy and of people in intractable
physical pain."

Those people may have a "necessity defense" -- the right to break a law to
avert an imminent and greater harm when no legal options are available.

The brief also suggests that an injunction might be fashioned to exempt
club activities that qualify as "joint purchases for shared use" of
marijuana.

But if the clubs are completely shut down, the brief says, "one way (San
Francisco) can envision responding to this law enforcement problem" -- a
significant increase in street-level drug dealing -- would be to call on
city employees to distribute marijuana to seriously ill patients.

The brief theorizes that if a local law were passed to authorize the
distribution, public workers could not be prosecuted for it. It concedes,
however, that there are "questions of whether such a plan would be lawful."