JOINT EFFORT

The plainly labeled brown door on the second floor of a Studio City
office gives no indication of the marijuana being sold inside.

Valley Collective Care keeps the deadbolt locked. Inside sits an
armed security guard; another watches over the stock. There is a
surveillance TV in the lobby, a few copies of Amsterdam News and a
white poster board with the handwritten message of the Fourth
Amendment, protection from warrantless searches.

Between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. daily, patients walk in with a slip of
paper and an ID, and a few minutes later leave with a cure for what ails them.

Valley Collective was one of the first medical marijuana dispensaries
in the San Fernando Valley when it opened last August. Now there are
at least 20 in the Valley, with about 50 operating countywide and
more than 200 throughout the state.

"This is the wild, wild West. Everybody is just trying to stake their
claim," said Scott H. Linden, a Pasadena attorney who has helped
several Valley dispensaries open.

Ten years after voters approved Proposition 215, legalizing marijuana
for medicinal purposes, these pharmacies operate with little oversight.

Advocates maintain fairly comprehensive databases, but government
officials, including those of the Los Angeles Police Department and
the county's public health chief, don't even know how many dispensaries exist.

All it takes to get started are a few easily obtained business
licenses, a willing landlord and a list of doctor-recommended
patients such as Fritz Weaver, 44, of North Hollywood.

"I can function on pot and it doesn't destroy my liver," said Weaver,
whose doctor told him to find an alternative to Vicodin for chronic
back pain. "It's a no-brainer."

Cannabis clubs, or co-operatives, have been the source of
controversy. Patients like Weaver have come to rely on them for
comfort, but communities have taken a decidedly different view.

Because they house massive amounts of cash and thousands of dollars
worth of marijuana, dispensaries have been targeted for
smash-and-grab burglaries; Valley Collective had computers and an
undisclosed amount of cash taken March 29. Some co-ops also have been
accused of selling to people without prescriptions.

Seeking to limit such problems, some Northern California communities
- - including San Francisco and Oakland - have moved to regulate where,
when and how these clinics operate.

Pasadena and 19 other cities have outright banned them.

And nearly 60 cities - including Simi Valley, Moorpark, Long Beach
and West Hollywood, which already had seven - have enacted
moratoriums on new dispensaries.

L.A. County Supervisors are scheduled to vote May 9 on a law to allow
dispensaries in unincorporated areas, though not within 1,000 feet of
schools, youth facilities, churches and parks. The proposed law would
also require specific signage, proper lighting and security guards.

Sgt. Lee Sands, a Los Angeles police spokesman, said there has not
been a trend of criminal activity occurring around cannabis clubs.
The city has no regulations planned.

"Dispensaries must be regulated," said John Furry, founder of
Weedtracker.com, which reviews co-ops based on their level of
"compassion" for sick and dying people. Low marks fall to those
places that overcharge because they know someone will pay.

"Many of these operators are in it just for the money," said Richard
Eastman, an AIDS patient who in 1996 helped open L.A.'s first
dispensary. "How could someone on Medicare or Social Security afford
$20 a joint?"

Federal laws still consider it a felony to grow, sell or use
marijuana. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last June that Californians
could be federally prosecuted for using marijuana - even if it was
allowed under the state's Compassionate Use Act of 1996.

That means agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration could come
knocking on Valley Collective's door any day. That's one reason
co-ops keep close to the chest the names of their owners and employees.

DEA has performed dozens of raids during the past five years, the
biggest and most recent on 13 dispensaries in San Diego in December.
In many cases, paraphernalia has been confiscated but charges have
not been filed.

Twenty people involved with medical marijuana have been convicted on
drug charges since Proposition 215 passed, according to Americans for
Safe Access. The DEA's office in Los Angeles couldn't verify that. To
them, there is no distinction between using marijuana recreationally
or medicinally - both are illegal.

But agents can't just shut down dispensaries the moment they open,
said DEA spokeswoman Sarah Fenno.

"If you read in the paper someone was selling meth out of their
house, we couldn't just go and arrest them. We would still have to
conduct an investigation and obtain a search warrant or an arrest
warrant to identify the players involved," Fenno said.

The Food and Drug Administration entered the politically charged
arena April 20, when it said "no scientific studies supported medical
use of marijuana."

That was endorsed by the White House Office of National Drug Control
Policy, which interacts with DEA.

"We certainly don't want the absolutely fraudulent claim that this is
some therapeutic medicine to sweep in here and confuse people about
the risk that they are running when they take marijuana," Dave
Murray, special assistant to the drug czar, said in an interview last
week. "This is not a proven medicine. It has not been approved by the FDA."

This has caused much grumbling in the medical-research community.

"It's politics and not science that is driving the train here," said
Dr. Donald Abrams, a professor of clinical medicine at University of
California, San Francisco, whose studies have shown marijuana
benefits some AIDS patients.

To many, the FDA's statement seemed to ignore a 1999 review by the
Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences.
That 288-page report found marijuana to be helpful with certain
cancer and AIDS patients, particularly those having problems eating.

"There is an awful lot of scientific evidence," said Dr. John Benson,
co-chairman of the review committee.

Cannabis sativa, as marijuana is known medically, has been found most
beneficial for treating chronic pain; muscle spasms, such as those
caused by multiple sclerosis; the physical wasting away of AIDS
patients; and chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting.

Eastman, 53, of Hollywood was experiencing the wasting. Since
contracting HIV in 1994, Eastman has been at death's door several
times. Anti-retrovirals are keeping him alive, but they strip him of
his appetite. Some AIDS patients literally starve to death.

Eastman didn't want to beat the disease, only to die from the treatment.

Early on he remembered that smoking marijuana as a teen had given him
the "munchies," that stoner struggle to fill an insatiable hunger.
Eastman's daily routine consists of taking protease inhibitors to
combat the now-undetectable AIDS eight times a day and smoking
marijuana twice, shortly after he wakes up and again two hours before bed.

"About an hour and a half ago, I smoked some medical marijuana, which
is helping me eat this now," he said over a bacon-and-eggs breakfast.

"When we got the law in '96, I thought we'd won. Why do I still have
to keep fighting 10 years later?" Eastman asked.
The debate over medical marijuana has been running for more than a
century and a half.

Marijuana was introduced into western medicine in 1842, Abrams said.
It was a legal, if unsavory, substance until four years after
Prohibition ended. In 1937, marijuana had been identified as the drug
of jazzmen and Mexican farmers, and Congress moved to outlaw it.

At hearings before the House of Representatives, the only opposition
to the Marihuana Tax Act came from the American Medical Association,
which thought cannabis cultivation and consumption should remain
legal but be regulated.

"The AMA stood alone in opposing it because they believed there was
no real evidence it was harmful and they believed it would impede
further studies," Abrams said. "And they were right about that."

In 1942, cannabis was removed from the U.S. Pharmacopoeia. It wasn't
until 1986 that the FDA approved Marinol, a synthetic concentrate of
the ingredient THC. Many patients dislike Marinol because it takes
longer to enter the bloodstream and is more potent when it does.

"People don't know what it is about," said Gerardo Servin, a
20-year-old Glendale man who uses marijuana for an anxiety disorder.
"They just think people are medicinal cannabis users because they
want to smoke pot. Every day people look at me and they judge me."

While some of the estimated 150,000 cannabis patients statewide have
their prescriptions written by a family physician, like Servin did,
many travel hundreds of miles to visit one of the self-proclaimed pot docs.

Many of these 35 physicians, who are listed on the Web site of the
California chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws, specialize in cannabis-related cases.

Referrals can be found on other Web sites, too. Weedtracker.com has
an advertisement at the top of every page that lists a phone number
and reads: "Medical Marijuana Recommendations." The 877 number
connects to the West Hollywood office of Dr. James Eisenberg, who
declined interview requests.

During the past decade, the California Medical Board has disciplined
four physicians for prescribing marijuana without a thorough
examination. Eisenberg was not among those disciplined.

Once the prescription has been written, patients choose their co-op.

They are called co-operatives because, by law, the dispensary can
only have a half-pound of marijuana in stock for every patient on its rolls.

Many of these places resemble "drug dens," said Linden, the attorney
who has helped open dispensaries.

"It has started to turn around. The places I'm working with now are
more professional," he said, echoing a common refrain of the six
co-ops visited.

"When you walk in, it should be the same thing as walking into a
doctor's office. That's how it should feel. It should be professional."