The Growers



Are you kidding? It's going to be a gold rush out there!"
That's how a pot grower named Jake put it when I asked him if he thought
there'd be a lot of marijuana planted in California this summer. Already
marijuana is the state's biggest cash crop, estimated in the early 1990's
at $1.4 billion a year, almost twice the value of the next most lucrative
crop, cotton. Proposition 215 has not only expanded the market but also
conferred a kind of quasi respectability on marijuana growing that
appears to be drawing new legions into the field. They may be in for a
rude surprise.

I met Jake at the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative, where he'd come
to drop off two pounds of marijuana grown at an indoor site in
California's Central Valley. Jake, who is 30, just finished up at
Berkeley after a stint in the Marine Corps. He's a tanned, squarejawed,
6footplus jock, Californiadivision, dressed in shorts, rugby shirt and
RayBans. Today he has come to market with a harvest of "Bubblegum," a
strain named for its unusually sweet smell, and the scene in the back
room of the Oakland coop has a definite El Exigente flavor to it.

The El Exigente role is played by Jeff Jones, the coop's curlyhaired
23yearold proprietor, who uses a loupe to expertly examine the grower's
buds. Magnified, the cannabis flowers are encrusted with
yellowishorange crystals and packed tightly around the stem. Jones is
also looking for signs of fungus, a particular concern among his AIDS
clientele. He pronounces himself delighted with the quality of Jake's
product, and everyone smiles.

During the winter Jake and his partners grow indoors, both in the
Central Valley and Oakland, but in the summer months he moves up to his
40acre plot in the mountains to the east, to grow outdoors and enjoy
nature. Last summer a forest fire swept through, and his 80 plants were
discovered by firefighters. They alerted the county narcs, but Jake was
able to talk his way out of an arrest. "We just hit it off It was a
malebonding thing. I told them it was medical marljuana, and that I was
growing it for the clubs." One imagines California law enforcement
officials will be hearing that quite a lot this summer. Indeed, there
don't seem to be any ordinary pot growers left in the state; everybody's
moved into medical marijuana.

Jake says he sells exclusively to the clubs, under contract. Contract
marijuana growing is a decidedly curious practice spawned by Proposition
215. A club issues a piece of paper to a grower designating him as a
"care giver." The language of 215 gives patients and their care givers
the right to cultivate marijuana; whether a grower unknown to a patient
can, in any meaningful sense, be that patient's care giver seems arguable
at best, but that is the operative legal fiction. A typical contract
requires growers to sell exclusively to the club; to cultivate fewer than
50 plants; to grow organically; and to fly the Geneva cross over their
garden. The price for contractgrown medical marijuana in California is
$3,200 a pound, compared with between $5,000 and $7,000 for the other
kind. Growers told me the new price was established almost
singlehandedly by Dennis Peron, who buys enough marijuana to move the
market. "If you're looking for more than $3,200, Dennis won't even take
your call," one grower grumped to me.

Why are growers willing to accept such a deep discount on a crop the
cultivation of which is probably still a state crime, and is undoubtedly
still a Federal one? Jake's experience with his local narcs suggests an
answer. Proposition 215 "created an opportunity to grow without being
completely paranoid," he says. Indeed, Jake is feeling so confident these
days that he's thinking of simply notifying the local authorities of his
marijuana plot this season to avoid any hassles.

"It'd be nice to be a proper garden," he says, "and not a covert
operation.

The closest thing to a truly legitimate marijuana garden I saw in
California was Valerie Corral's, tucked into the hills above Santa Cruz
in a grove of redwoods overlooking the glittering Pacific. Valerie is
herself a medicalmarijuana patient, and though her garden was twice
raided in the years before 215, the city of Santa Cruz has consistently
declined to prosecute her. Indeed, the Mayor of Santa Cruz recently
honored Corral by proclamation in appreciation of her work growing
marijuana and giving it away to indigent patients through her nonprofit
Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana, or WAMM. In Santa Cruz Corral is
the Florence Nightingale and Johnny Appleseed of medical marijuana rolled
into one.

orall has suffered from epilepsy since being injured in a freak
automobile accident 24 years ago. Doctors put her on a regime of drugs
that only partly quieted her grand mal seizures, and marooned her in a
permanent narcotic stupor. When her husband, Michael, read an article
about a study claiming marijuana smoke controlled seizures in laboratory
animals, she gave it a try and says her seizures stopped completely.
Today marijuana is the only drug she uses, taking a puff or two whenever
she senses the "aura" that many epileptics experience in the moments
before a seizure; without fall, she told me, the mental storm is
averted.

Corral was instrumental in persuading the drafters of Proposition 215 to
include the provinon allowing patients and their care givers to cultivate
marijuana. "Unless people can grow their own medical marijuana it's going
to be too expensive," she explained, as she showed me around her garden
late one afternoon. On the terraced hillside surrounding her tiny house,
she and Micheal tend a menagerie of exotic fruits, vegetables and herbs:
tea, figs, Thai basil, guava, passion fruit, ginger and, at one time or
another, some 32 varieties of marijuana. Corral offers WAMM members free
seedlings so they can grow their own. The most important reason for
growing one's own marijuana, Corral says, is to stay out of the black
market, "where you never know what you're getting." The quality of
medical marijuana matters deeply to the Corrals. They scrupulously
preserve the genetics of the various strains they've collected over the
years and are working to hybridize new ones geared toward specific
ailments.

There are many California growers who, along with smaller growers like
Jake and the Corrals, would like nothing better than to see marijuana
legalized, this despite the fact that prices would plummet and
competition would increase. The cost of doing business would also
decline: growers today are forced to maintain a number of small,
inefficient gardens at widely dispersed locations in order to protect
themselves against crop loss and mandatory minimum sentences, which kick
in whenever more than 99 plants are seized. Peter Gorman, the veteran
executive editor of High Times, the magazine of marijuana devotees, told
me that "the good growers would take it" legalization "in a second.
They're confident of their skills and of their genetics that they've got
the best product. Sure, if pot were legalized it'd take a lot more work
to make the same amount of money; but just think you could grow it at
home, and invite people over to see your garden."

The Cops



AFter Jake finished up his business at the Oakland coop, he
offered to give me a

lift to my next appointment, which happened to be at the Oakland Police
Department. I'd come to interview Lieut. Pete Peterson, who has the job
of implementing Proposition 215 in that city; and when I asked him
whether a hypothetical grower like Jake would be protected by from
prosecution by his contract and red cross, he laughed. "A lot of growers
are in for a big surprise this summer," he said. "If we found anyone in
Oakland with 80 plants, we would take them down." He told me he had no
idea where the Oakland coop was getting its marijuana, but guessed "it's
being grown up in Mendocino, probably by a bunch of hippies my age."

Peterson, who's 49 and works in plaid shirt sleeves in a dismal, hot
basement office, has been working closely with Jeff Jones over at the
coop to make sure medical marijuana doesn't become a lawenforcement
problem in Oakland. His first visit to the coop had been memorable: "As
soon as you get off the elevator that smell hits you, and all you can
think about is, Where's a door to kick in!" Like Scott Savage, his
counterpart in San Jose, Peterson believes the clubs, even though they
are not mentioned in Proposition 215, are probably the best way to manage
medical marijuana in California. "From a lawenforcement perspective,
it's a lot easier to deal with a single club than with a lot people on
the street claimmg to be medicalmarijuana patients."

Peterson is a member of the California Narcotic Officers' Association,
which led a fierce campaign against Proposition 215 by statewide police
organizations. But now that it is the law, the attitude of the state's
lawenforcement community has mellowed. "I think most lawenforcement
people feel pretty comfortable with it now," I was told by Thomas J.
Gorman, the association's spokesman on medical marijuana. He don't have
to like it, but we're going to try to make it work it s the law."

I asked Peterson if the "1egal anarchy" predicted by Attorney General
Lungren had come to pass. He smiled. Now and then cops will encounter a
suspect falsely claiming to be a patient, but by and large, medical
marijuana appears well on its way to becoming routine in Oakland. When a
police officer picks up someone with a small quantity of marijuana
claiming to be a patient, he calls the 24hour 800 number on the back of
the suspect's Oakland coop I.D. card; if Jeff Jones can confirm he is a
member, he is simply released at the scene. This seems to be common
practice in Northern California; in the southern part of the state,
however the police will often proceed with the arrest, forcing a
defendant to raise the medicalmarijuana defense at trial.

That approach is consistent with the state Attorney General's official
guidelines. Confounding his own predictions, Dan Lungren appears to be
making a goodfaith effort to implement the new law with as little
turmoil as possible; the day after the vote, he issued a set of police
procedures governing medical marijuana that, while stringent, certainly
gave the lie to the idea that 215 was unworkable. Lungren is thought to
be running for Governor, and probably sees no point in bucking the
voter's will on medical marijuana; also, it would do his political future
little good if legal anarchy actually were to break out on his

watch. No doubt lawenforcement problems lie ahead (especially with
regard to cultivation and transportation), and much about 215 remains to
be adjudicated (regarding the legal status of the clubs, and the question
of whether a medicalmarijuana defense should be raised at arraignment or
trial), but so far the most extraordinary thing about med C ical
marijuana in California law enforcement is just how quickly it is
becoming ordinary.

One evening near the end of my trip to California, the subject of
medical marijuana came up at a dinner with reatives in Berkeley. I
noticed that my 12yearold nephew was listening intently as I talked
about the place of marijuana in the lives of people like Keith Vines and
Valerie Corral; he looked perplexed, and I was deciding whether to drop
the subject when he broke in: "Wait a minute. Marijuana medicine? I
thought marijuana ruins your life. So how can it be also medicine?"

My nephew's questions are ones many Americans will soon be weighing.

In the years since the 1982 speech in which Ronald Reagan declared war on
drugs, marijuana the only drug he mentioned by name has moved to the
very center of that war. Law enforcement officials like to talk about
their splashy victories over heroin and cocaine, but in fact the
everyday; slogging battles that make up the modern drug war revolve
largely around marijuana. The greatest number of arrests are for
marijuana crimes, and those account for a significant portion of the
asset forfeitures that Police Department budgets have come to rely on.
Marijuana is the primary focus of drugprevention efforts in the schools
and drugtesting in the workplace. Indeed, it may not be possible to have
a drug war on the scale we now do without illicit marijuana. Remove the
millions of marijuana users from the ranks of illicit drug users and we
would be left with "a drug abuse epidemic" involving roughly two million
regular heroin and cocaine users a public health problem, to be sure,
but hardly one big enough to justify spending $16 billion a year.

Perhaps this explains why not only the Clinton Administration but also
players on both sides of the drug issue from groups like the Community
AntiDrug Coalitions of America (CADCA) to Americans for Medical Rights
and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML)
have decided that the future of the national drug war may well hinge on
the issue of medical marijuana. For the first time since the 1970's,
when NORML had the ear of President Carter and a handful of states were
decriminalizing marijuana, an actual, twosided political battle has
broken out around the issue of drug policy in America.

The passage of 215 has galvanized supporters of the drug war, who have
recently scored victories over medical marijuana in Arizona (where
Proposition 200 was all but gutted by the Legislature) and in Ohio, where
a medicalmarijuana bill that was passed without controversy in the last
legislative session was suddenly repealed. Antidrug groups also came
close to overturning a medicalmarijuana defense on the books in
Virginia. Supporters of medical marijuana view these setbacks as
temporary; part of the inevitable backlash to 215. They recognize that
while politicians still reflexively recoil from the charge of being "soft
on drugs," the voters are a different story. Which is why
medicalmarijuana proponents are focusing their efforts on ballot
initiatives, in Oregon, Washington State, Colorado, Nebraska, Ohio,
Florida and Maine. Nationally; their strategy to is create a checkerboard
of "medicalmarijuana states" that will eventually bring pressure on
Congress to change its laws. So far public opinion appears to be on their
side: in May; an ABC News poll found 69 percent of Americans support the
legalization of medical marijuana.

Even so, the new crop of initiatives most of which are modeled on
Califomia's will face stiff opposition, from General McCaffrey (who is
seeking to spend millions on a publicservice advertising campaign on
marijuana) and from politically powerful grassroots groups groups
that, it should be noted, are now eligible for Federal funds under the
DrugFree Communities Act signed last month by President Clinton. More
than 80 percent of Americans oppose legalization of marijuana, and it is
legalization, not marijuana's medical uses, that the Clinton
Administration wants to have frame the issue.

All concerned understand they are fighting a shadow war; the "slippery
slope" is a metaphor that shapes the thinking on both sides, for
opponents and proponents alike are joined in the conviction that the
country's acceptance of medical marijuana as something ordinary would in
time undermine the very foundations of the drug war. So General McCaffrey
may be on to something about medical marijuana when he suggests that it
sends the wrong message; indeed, it contradicts a quartercentury of
official messages about drugs. Medical marijuana sends the message that
there are different kinds of drugs and different reasons for taking them,
that drug use and abuse are not necessarily the same thing and that the
Federal Government may not have the last word on the subject. It resumes
a conversation about drugs as a public health issue that the modern drug
war, with its cry of "zero tolerance," tried to silence a conversation
in which the words of doctors and scientists count for as much as those
of politicians and moralists.

The passage of Proposition 215 marks the end of "Just say no" and the
beginning of Americans saying a great many other things about drugs. It
is a conversation that the war on drugs may not survive.

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