SACRAMENTO POT FARMER'S MOM WENT TO JAIL FOR WHAT HE DOES LEGALLY

Down a rutted dirt road from Garden Highway and the Sacramento River
levee, organic farmer David Tat Chow cultivates a crop that sent his
hippie mother and stepfather to state prison.

On his tiny, hardscrabble plot, he tends to apple trees, radishes,
bell peppers, tomatoes, crookneck squash and a few dozen marijuana plants.

He grows for medical pot users on a farm federal agents spent years
trying to seize over a couple of ounces of weed.

California now brims with legal marijuana dispensaries, pot doctors
and a burgeoning industry serving tens of thousands of medical
cannabis users. A November ballot measure seeks to legalize
recreational marijuana use and small private cultivation for
adults over 21.

Chow's family saga speaks volumes about changes in marijuana
politics, enforcement and social acceptance.

These days, Chow invites American Indian speakers, fellow growers and
other interested guests to his farm for classes on marijuana cultivation.

He leads the sessions in a soft voice, tinged with grief. He tells of
his mother, who died of breast cancer in 1993, after returning from
prison. He tells of a protracted fight as a young man to save the
property from federal seizure.

"My parents were made an example," he said. "(The authorities) said,
'If you grow marijuana, we're going to put you in prison and we're
going to take your property.' It was 21/2 ounces of marijuana and
they served 21/2 years in prison."

It started in 1989 when heavily armed narcotics officers, with
multiple vehicles and battering rams, surged onto the 2.75-acre Full
Circle Farm. The working ranch included turkeys, a few cows, organic
row crops and 20 marijuana plants.

They arrested Marsha Chow, a wildflower seller and food bank
volunteer, and her husband, Richard Johnson, a dreadlocked
Rastafarian and decorated Vietnam combat veteran.

The parents were sentenced to three years in prison in a plea deal
that kept the son from also being prosecuted.

Chow, then 19, was left to hold things together.

After the state case, federal agents raided the farm, intent on
seizing the property under a federal forfeiture law.

Authorities said Marsha Chow and Johnson were drug dealers, on
probation for felony marijuana convictions in Tehama County. They
said the packaging equipment, scales and a semiautomatic weapon at
the farm indicated serious criminal activity.

The case drew the attention of Bee columnist Jim Trotter, who took up
for the hippie growers. "This law has been used extensively in recent
years to seize the boats, airplanes and estates of big-time drug
dealers," Trotter wrote after visiting the farm in 1990. "... If
there is any drug wealth associated with this place, it isn't readily
apparent."

Sacramento lawyer Donald Heller, a former federal prosecutor, said
the U.S. Justice Department during the 1980s and early 1990s waged
aggressive campaigns against even small-time drug offenders.

"The bonus at the time was the forfeiture and seizing property,"
said Heller, now a criminal defense attorney. He said authorities
today would be unlikely to deploy resources in a similar case.

Chow fought a legal battle for nearly five years before writing a
$10,000 check an inheritance from his grandfather to settle the
case and keep the farm in 1994. A few months earlier, his mother had
died of breast cancer. His stepfather passed away in 2000.

"The time I lost with my mother is worth 100 times more than the
$10,000 I spent," he said.

Today Chow, a welder and construction worker injured in a fall from a
roof, staples physicians' recommendations for marijuana for himself
and other medical users to the side of a splintered work shed.

It is his notice he is following the law under California's 1996
Compassionate Use Act for medical marijuana.

Last weekend, people who had known his parents dropped in on Chow's class.

Michael Tamburelli, 53, returned to the farm where he once bought
wildflowers and vegetables from Marsha Chow. He said he also had
known Johnson "as a Rasta guy who was real mellow.

"They weren't selling weed," Tamburelli said. "Hell, they didn't have
enough weed."

He added: "I'm just glad the farm is still here and 'Tat' (David
Chow) is doing what he is doing now."

Chow started his class by displaying handwritten notes from his
mother. She described "a small self-sufficiency farm" selling organic
fruits and vegetables at farmers markets.

She touted organic growing and railed against pesticides. "We are
concerned about a vanishing tradition of living on the land," she wrote.

Chow told her story before he instructed visitors in how to tend to
one of his "Purple Gum Indica" plants.

He is unable to escape the bitter irony that his parents paid dearly
for what he now does legally.

"It is so ridiculous that educated people can justify putting people
like my mother in prison," he said. "Marijuana is just a plant. It's
just a plant."