MARIN ALLIANCE LIGHTING UP LIVES

A day in the life of Marin's oldest medical marijuana dispensary

Cheech and Chong would be appalled. The longtime purveyors of
marijuana-laced hilarity would have found little to riff on at the
Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana in Fairfax on a recent Sunday
afternoon. For four hours, the pot peddler of Marin, one of the
oldest marijuana dispensaries in California, proved downright dull.

No spliffs were lit up in the waiting room. Bongs were nowhere to be
seen. Peter Tosh's "Legalize It" wasn't blasting out of the stereo.
Heck, there was nary a longhair in sight all day. The names on two
white board menus, one listing more than a dozen varieties of
available marijuana strains and the other full of marijuana edibles
such as cookies, brownies and "Flying Saucers," provided more
chuckles than any customer. A few marijuana-related posters and
fliers perched on the walls above the two old white couches in the
waiting room were the only thing to keep this place from feeling like
a professional-yet-shabby doctor's office. Instead, a diverse,
discreet group of around 30 people stopped in throughout the day,
with the vast majority in and out the door in a matter of minutes,
quietly heading to their car while holding a small brown paper bag.
No one even sparked up a bowl in the parking lot.

"It's amazing to see the kinds of people that come in and out," says
Sandy, a 57-year-old teacher from San Rafael who stopped by to pick
up some of the Lamb's Bread marijuana strain. "It always blows me
away. It's anybody and everybody. You can't say
that it's these kinds of people or that kind of people."

The Marin Alliance's operators want it that way. They credit
discretion and organization for being able to stay open in the same
location - tucked into an office building situated between a bank and
a Little League fieldE- for nearly 13 years. That span includes the
1996 passage of state Prop. 215, which legalized medical marijuana in
California but also put state law at odds with federal drug laws.
Club founder and longtime medical marijuana advocate Lynette Shaw
helped create the system by which people are legally permitted to
purchase marijuana from dispensaries. Would-be members must get a
written recommendation letter from a doctor for the use of marijuana
for medical treatment in order to get the state-issued medical
marijuana ID card.

To stay on the right side of the law locally, Shaw's club adheres to
a list of conditions for its use permit, including reduced hours
during Little League season and a prohibition on smoking anything
inside or outside the facility. "We don't let jokers come through,"
Shaw says. "If someone comes in and causes problems, they're gone.
Most of the people who come here are in crisis. This is place of
peace, not a place to party."

Shaw, one of medical marijuana advocate Dennis Peron's soldiers at
his Cannabis Buyers Club in San Francisco's Castro district in the
early 1990s, has fashioned the Marin Alliance as a caregiver,
providing medical marijuana to the chronically ill. Her stewardship
has allowed the club to steer clear of the pitfalls experienced by
the other three medical marijuana dispensaries opened in Marin in
recent months. Gate Five Caregivers in Sausalito, which opened late
last year despite the city's moratorium against medical marijuana
dispensaries, recently shut down following a string of break-ins. In
Novato, the five-month-old Apela Collective is in the midst of a
standoff with its Ignacio Center landlord over whether it should be
considered a nuisance. Going Green in Corte Madera has been open
since early May, but the town didn't know about it until earlier this month.

One of the primary criticisms of the medical marijuana system in
California is that it appears rife with loopholes. A quick Google
search brings up countless Web sites of medical doctors promising to
help you navigate the system, including one that goes by the name
PotDoc.com. And while each of the Marin Alliance customers willing to
speak to here claim legitimate illnesses, critics have suggested that
some of the ailments cited by patients do not stand up to Peron's
original intent to help the terminally ill and those with
debilitating illnesses.

"Doctors will cheat and lie to help some kid get pot to party with?
That's an insult," Shaw says. "Most medical professionals have a
little bit more integrity than that."

Marin Alliance members, who total 5,000 over nearly 13 years although
many have since left the club, say they value the low-risk,
low-hassle environment Shaw and her staff offer. "If it's here and
it's legal, I don't need to be buying from people like, "Hey you got
any weed?" Sandy says. "I've been down that road."

Michael, a 45-year-old ex-scaffolder, says although he's a longtime
supporter of medical marijuana, he had reservations about getting a
medical marijuana ID card. "This wasn't something that I wanted to be
involved with," he says. "It was a big stretch for me. But the people
that run this place are great, and I like the Ma and Pa aspect of it
compared to the big corporate pot clubs in Oakland."

Several members say they looked to marijuana after being prescribed
traditional pain killers such as Percocet or Vicodin after an injury.
Marc, a burly musician who visits the club once a week with his buddy
Steve was prescribed painkillers after he broke the tibia bone in his
right leg in a motorcycle crash five years ago. "I was all jacked up
on Oxycontin and then Norcos, and then I found out that instead of
popping a pill, I could smoke and relax and it took care of the pain," he says.

Steve, a hauler, smokes pot to calm his attention-deficit
hyperactivity disorder. "If this guy doesn't have pot, he's punching
people - either that or he's drinking," Marc says.

"And then I'm punching people," Steve says.

Barbara, a retail clerk from Novato, says she suffers from chronic
pain all over her body, but mostly in her back and knee. She says
that after years of trying prescription pain killers to no avail -
even morphine didn't do the trick - she tried marijuana at a Judas
Priest concert two years ago. "The pain was gone in like 15 minutes,"
she says. "I was like, 'Holy crap, I'm not in pain. This concert's awesome.'"

Barbara visits the club every two weeks, buys a quarter-ounce and
uses it to make chocolate chip cookies. She eats one about an hour
before she goes to bed, sleeps through the night and is pain-free for
most of the next day, she says. "My day-to-day pain is gone," she says.

She recently purchased some small marijuana plants from the Marin
Alliance in an attempt to grow her own. Shaw says one of the club's
goals is to empower medical marijuana patients to grow their own
weed, particularly since 2002, when she helped broker a deal that
called for police to no longer bust medical marijuana patients found
to be growing pot.

Alan, a 61-year-old Fairfax photographer, got a full $72 refund on
six baby plants he bought from the club that died within a week. He
used the credit to buy a much larger plant. Alan suffers from
Parkinson's disease, and says marijuana helps him cope with the
symptoms and the depression. He was diagnosed six years ago and was
prescribed a traditional antidepressant.

"I started taking it and started feeling a little better and all of a
sudden my hand tremor got worse," he says. "I looked on the label of
the antidepressant and 'tremor' is one of the side effects. So I
said, 'Forget that.'"

Since he joined the Marin Alliance five years ago, Alan says
marijuana has helped him stay creative and even-keel despite his
illness. "I've been letting the tremor guide me, and it's caused me
to shoot some very unorthodox photography," he says.
As Shaw helps Alan with his transaction, she's beaming. After years
of federal raids on marijuana dispensaries throughout California and
dozens of lawsuits for the Marin Alliance, these are clearly better
days for Shaw and her medical marijuana brethren. In March, Attorney
General Eric Holder said that the federal government would not devote
great effort to prosecuting low-level marijuana cases. In late May,
the U.S. Supreme Court rejected appeals from San Diego and San
Bernardino counties, which had objected to the state's medical
marijuana law and refused to issue ID cards under it.

In March, local filmmakers David Zacharin and Ed Dudkowski made a
short film about the alliance and entered it into the Fairfax Short
Documentary Challenge. Now, Shaw and Zacharin are looking to expand
on the idea. In addition, the alliance plans to take over a vacant
office next door, adding a larger waiting area, Shaw said.

"We've weathered a terrible storm," she says. "I'm not ready to do a
victory dance yet, but I feel better."

Challenges for Novato Dispensary

A Novato medical marijuana dispensary ordered with eviction a month
ago is still open for business, and its lawyer expects it to be open
for a long time to come.

That's great news for the almost 600 clients who have come to rely on
the Apela Collective for relief since it opened without city
officials' knowledge Jan. 15.

"All I've been hearing is, 'Thank God you're here,'" Apela Collective
manager Elizabeth Harris says. "I have had little old ladies coming
in almost in tears because they couldn't get over to Oakland or San
Francisco or even to Fairfax to buy what we offer."

The dispensary has been quietly operating in the Ignacio Center on
Entrada Drive. It was served a notice of eviction on May 5 by the
property owner, Ignacio Properties, which said Apela was in violation
of local and federal laws and was considered a nuisance. Since then
the city and Apela Collective attorney Edward Higginbotham have
traded letters seeking to understand each other's stances.

Higginbotham has filed a technical legal challenge because he said
the complaint is confusing. It will be heard in Marin Superior Court on June 29.