CALIFORNIA MARIJUANA CLUB STANDS FIRM AGAINST COURT RULINGS

SAN FRANCISCO -- The advertised price was $30 for an eighth of an ounce of
"Five Star Mexican Gold," and dollar bills were exchanged at a brisk clip
Friday for plastic bags of marijuana. But, in deference to a new court
ruling barring the sale of the drug by clubs, a hastily erected sign over
the marijuana bar read: "Remuneration Station."

"We are not selling marijuana anymore," Cannabis Cultivators Club founder
Dennis Peron said Friday, explaining his latest strategy to keep open what
looks like America's closest copy of an Amsterdam hashish bar. "We are
selling fertilizer, nutrients, lighting, pruning, the labor for production."

Not so, retorts California Attorney General Dan Lungren, a Republican
candidate for governor. The state's roughly 20 "cannabis clubs" will have
to close, he said, based on a state Supreme Court decision Wednesday. The
court let stand a lower court ruling that clubs, because they are not
"primary caregivers," cannot sell or give away marijuana to ill people.

And Thursday, a San Francisco County Superior Court judge issued a
preliminary injunction, based on those same grounds, prohibiting Peron from
selling, furnishing or giving away marijuana.

In 1996, California voters approved a measure to allow primary caregivers
to administer marijuana to the ill, under a doctor's supervision.

Ignoring last week's court ruling, Peron's five-story emporium served about
1,000 members Friday. He said that the club sells various types of
marijuana, all of which is grown either in the basement of the club or by
about 200 California farmers who have contracts with him. In his office,
barely screened from the thick clouds of marijuana smoke, Peron vowed to
"wait for the tanks."

Behind his desk was a hand-sewn silk banner, resplendent with green
marijuana leaves, announcing his campaign to win the Republican nomination
for governor.

"I'm going to have to be governor, so I can pardon myself," joked Peron,
who won his spot on the ballot two weeks ago under the state's new open
primary law. Peron gleefully noted that the primary battle pitted him
against his nemesis, Lungren, who shut down Peron's Cannabis Buyers Club
for five months in 1996. The club reopened after the state referendum
allowing the medical use of marijuana.

On hearing that Peron planned to run against him in the June 2 primary,
Lungren responded, "If Dennis Peron is running for governor on the
Republican ticket, he has smoked more marijuana than even I thought."

The animus between the two men reflects how little was solved by the
referendum in November 1996, when 56 percent of voters approved the medical
use of marijuana.

Today, about 10,000 ailing Californians are thought to buy marijuana for
medical use. Marijuana is used by AIDS sufferers to restore their
appetites, by cancer and chemotherapy patients to control nausea, by people
with multiple sclerosis to control muscle spasms, and by people with
glaucoma to reduce blinding pressures in their eyes.

"I have been using marijuana every day for the last six years," Hazel
Rodgers, a 78-year-old grandmother who has glaucoma, said Saturday between
puffs on her pipe at the Cannabis Club. "It keeps the pressure down in your
eyes. I also use it for arthritis."

Monday and Tuesday, the medical effectiveness of marijuana was debated at
hearings in Washington conducted by the National Academy of Sciences. And
the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy has commissioned a
$1 million study on the issue, which is to be ready by December.

In November, voters in Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, Nevada, Washington, D.C.,
and Washington state are expected to vote on medical marijuana measures
like the ones passed in California and in Arizona in 1996.

"We believe we are going to have strong victories in those states," said
Robert Kampia, a director of the Marijuana Policy Project, a group that
lobbies for medical access to marijuana. National polls, he said, show
widespread support for allowing ailing people to use marijuana.

But state and federal officials have shown their determination to prevent
Northern California from becoming the nation's pot pioneer.

In January, six of the cannabis clubs operating in the Bay area were named
in a lawsuit filed by the federal government that sought court orders to
close them for violating federal laws against growing, distributing and
possessing marijuana. Since then, three of the clubs have closed.

In legal papers filed Friday, lawyers for the clubs contend that the
federal government has no jurisdiction because all the marijuana the clubs
distribute is grown in California and interstate commerce laws do not apply.

But Michael Yamaguchi, U.S. attorney for Northern California, said in
seeking the court orders: "Under our system of federalism, laws passed by
Congress cannot be overridden or supplanted by state law. Federal law
continues to prohibit the distribution of marijuana at the cannabis clubs."

In a warning to other medical marijuana clubs in California, Gregory King,
a Department of Justice spokesman, said Friday: "Our enforcement efforts
are continuing. Charges may be brought in the future."

In California, the suits have highlighted the legal gray area of medical
marijuana.

In conservative areas like Orange and Ventura counties in the southern part
of the state, sheriffs and local officials have closed clubs, acting as
though the 1996 referendum never took place. In more liberal areas, local
health and police officials have worked with cannabis clubs, encouraging
such controls as standard medical forms from doctors and photo
identification cards for members. In November, a state conference attended
by 28 "medical cannabis providers" drew up uniform guidelines.

Until the federal civil suits were announced, officials in San Mateo
County, a coastal area south of San Francisco, were drawing up plans to
provide marijuana to certified ill people through public dispensaries.

North of San Francisco, in Mendocino County, local officials debated
whether to use a vacant lot behind the Fort Bragg police station to grow
marijuana, which city police would then distribute to registered sick
people. Plans have since been suspended.

Local officials in Northern California reacted negatively to news of the
lawsuits. In Santa Cruz and Oakland, the city councils unanimously passed
resolutions condemning the federal action and defending local cannabis clubs.

In San Francisco, where the police and city attorneys have long tolerated
the medical use of marijuana, Mayor Willie Brown attacked the suits.

On another front, doctors and a lawyer in the San Francisco city attorney's
office have brought a class-action suit to prevent federal authorities from
punishing doctors who recommend the medical use of marijuana for patients.

"The federal government and the state government have totally failed to
carry out the mandate of the voters, which was that the government should
establish a safe and affordable system of medical marijuana for the
patients that needed it," said Dale Gieringer, California coordinator for
the National Organization for the Reform of the Marijuana Laws, a private
group.

Down at the Cannabis Cultivators Club, which sells about 30 pounds of
marijuana a month, Peron considers the clubs closing around San Francisco
and admits, "Everybody has just panicked."

His assistant, Randi Webster, recalled what happened to her, and to the
club's ill clients, when the club closed in 1996.

"Marijuana makes the difference from me being here as a useful member of
society and laying at home in the fetal position in constant pain," said
Ms. Webster, whose illnesses include two kinds of arthritis. Ms. Webster, a
43-year-old who has decorated the club with her hand-folded origami swans,
added:

"With marijuana, I can type 150 words a minute, fold origami, and walk
without assistance. When the club closed, people died; I was paralyzed."

Nibbling on a Rice Krispie cookie laced with marijuana, Peron vowed that he
and his 8,000 members would resist with civil disobedience if state or
federal agents ever tried to padlock his premises again.

"If they get an injunction against us, we are going to stand in the
doorway, and open again," said Peron, who smokes and eats marijuana to
combat depression. "If we can't sell here, we will sell on the sidewalk.
They will have to throw all of us in jail."