Marijuana Clubs Remain Outlawed

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) The strains of sitar music mingle with the smoke at the
Cannabis Cultivators Cooperative, a '60sstyle bistro where the menu lists
eight grades of ``top quality'' marijuana.

A glass counter displays the best sellers: marijuanafilled brownies and
peanut butter cookies; ``merry pills''; and rum bottles and glossy
redandgreen boxes bearing the club's Phoenix and Amigo brands.

``We call it the pharmaceutical nightclub,'' said Tracy Williams, 30, who is
paralyzed and often travels nearly 60 miles from his Santa Cruz home for the
drug he smokes to ease his muscle spasms.

Since California legalized medical marijuana in November, the state's
marijuana clubs have evolved from black market drug dens to bona fide
cannabis retailers. They pay taxes, take bank cards and register patients.

But the state's illdefined medical marijuana statute still makes outlaws of
buyers clubs. And the patients who come in wheelchairs or on canes and
often bear the purplish lesions that mark AIDS sufferers risk arrest daily
in the effort to ease their pain.

``I've known two people who have been busted in the last few weeks,'' said
San Franciscan Jay Segal, 48, who smokes marijuana to relieve the side
effects of AIDS drugs. ``The funny thing is that the rightwingers all say
marijuana leads to crime. Look around you a lot of stoners laying on
couches. This is crime?''

At least a dozen clubs have opened in California, including sites in Los
Angeles, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, San Jose, Hayward, Marin and seven locations
in San Francisco.

But the law's silence on key legal questions has led to widely varying
enforcement from city to city, arrests of patients, federal agents
threatening doctors, black market deals between growers and buyers clubs and
the federal raid of a San Francisco club.

The November citizen referendum, Proposition 215, legalized as of Jan. 1
marijuana possession by anyone with a doctor's recommendation. But
transporting it even to the user's home remains illegal.

Authorities are grappling with such unanswered questions as whether smoking
in clubs violates state antismoking statutes, whether cultivating the drug
off club grounds remains a felony and whether sales between grower and club
are illegal.

Even clubs that adhere to a conservative interpretation of the law by growing
their supplies on the spot break the law by buying blackmarket seeds,
according to state and federal authorities.

``Prop 215 is a mess,'' said Karyn Sinunu, assistant district attorney in
charge of the Santa Clara County narcotics unit. ``I don't know if the voters
thought this stuff would fall from heaven or what, but that just wasn't
addressed before this thing was passed.''

Helen, 79, who asked that her last name not be used, risks a prison term each
time she carries a bag of lowgrade marijuana on the twohour drive from the
San Francisco club to her home in Sacramento. The marijuana cookies she bakes
allow her 79yearold husband, Norman, to sleep through the pain of a
condition that leaves nerves exposed.

``At least he sleeps,'' she said, standing out in her neatly pressed suit
near a customer in a Grateful Dead Tshirt and a shirtless man with necklace
of cannabis leaves. ``I don't care what the federal government says, it has
helped this man.''

Downstairs, club manager Dennis Peron talked to an intermediary about taking
on a new supplier for the 40 pounds of marijuana the club's nearly 4,000
members go through each week. Asked if such deals are legal, he shrugged.

``The law's only been in effect for five months,'' said Peron, who led the
state campaign to legalize medical marijuana. ``The plant takes six months to
grow. We're currently buying on the underground market.''

Prosecutors in each region are making up the law as they go along.

In San Francisco, nearly everything goes. In San Jose, one of the city's two
new pharmacylike buyers clubs was closed under a zoning law that imposes
similar restrictions on the location of adult bookstores. Prosecutors say
state smoking law bans smoking at the remaining site. And suppliers in Santa
Clara County risk felony drug charges because authorities there consider
transportation of marijuana illegal.

Across the San Francisco Bay, the 1,100member Oakland Cannabis Buyer's Club
keeps a low profile. There is no sign at the club, which sells two to five
pounds of cannabis each week, only a buzzer labeled ``Oakland CBC'' in a
doorway wedged between a travel service and an employment office. Patients
present photo membership cards at a pharmacystyle counter for their daily
limit of onequarter ounce.

``We don't want to be flagrant. We know we're changing society,'' said the
club's proprietor, Jeff Jones, 22, whose father died of cancer when he was
14. ``I just wish I could have done the same for my father.''

The club works with a police liaison officer who calls an 800number to
verify members. Several buyers have been arrested but were later released,
although officers have sometimes confiscated the drugs.

The difference between local views on the law pales in comparison to the gulf
among, local, state and federal officials. State Attorney General Dan Lungren
and Sacramento authorities say clubs don't qualify as the ``primary
caregivers'' the law permits to cultivate the drug.

Federal law, unlike California law, finds no medicinal value in marijuana.
Federal drug agents seized 331 plants at San Francisco's Flower Therapy club
April 21 in what San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan called a
``befuddling'' raid of a legitimate business.

The Clinton administration has gone further, threatening to challenge the
license of any doctor who recommends marijuana.

``So we have things like doctors saying, `If I could prescribe it I would,
but I'm not,''' said Ms. Sinunu, the narcotics prosecutor. ``That's
ridiculous.''