CANNABIS COUPLE: MARTYRS OR DRUG DEALERS?

Dr. Marion P. "Mollie" Fry packs for federal prison in her red
"Marijuana Medic" T-shirt.

She is an activist who wears her cause, who clutches a medical cross
with a cannabis leaf, who points animatedly at her chest hollowed by
radical breast cancer surgery. Her emotional account has stirred
rallies demanding acceptance for the "medicine" that alleviated her suffering.

Now, in a widely followed saga, Fry, 54, and her husband, Dale
Schafer, 56, are to surrender Monday to serve five years in federal
prison for conspiring to produce and distribute marijuana.

They are headed to prison after spurning a plea deal that would have
spared Fry any time behind bars and given her husband 1 1/2 years.
They are losing their freedom, said federal Judge Frank Damrell, due
to their own "self-aggrandizement" as "missionaries for marijuana"
that left them feeling impervious to the law.

To California medical marijuana advocates, Fry and Schafer are
martyrs for the cause. They portray the El Dorado County couple, a
physician who recommended pot and an attorney who counseled patients
on marijuana law, as compassionate servants who believed in the
healing properties of cannabis.

"It's a sad statement that we're going to witness a cancer survivor
who recommended marijuana for lawful patients going to prison," said
Kris Hermes, a spokesman for Americans for Safe Access, an advocacy
group for medical marijuana users.

Prosecutors say the case of Fry, 54, and Schafer, 56, might have
started as a sympathetic story of a husband growing some marijuana
for his ill wife until it ballooned into a lucrative criminal conspiracy.

They say the couple raked in up to $1 million or more selling
medicinal pot recommendations and luring medical clients by illegally
distributing marijuana through couriers and even packages sent via
United Parcel Service.

"They became very aggressive in their pursuit of this business model
and they made a lot of money doing it," said U.S. Attorney Benjamin
Wagner in Sacramento. "Unfortunately, they tried to milk the tragic
side of her medical condition to develop this heroic narrative, which
doesn't square with the facts."

It has been three years since Shafer and Fry were sentenced. Ten
years have passed since they were raided and 12 since authorities
began investigating Fry's medical clinic along Highway 49 in rural
Cool and the marijuana gardens at their home on Waterfall Trail in Greenwood.

Their story chronicles the evolution of medical marijuana in
California. It offers conflicting accounts about Mollie Fry and Dale
Schafer, as crusaders for healing or profiteering conspirators.

Based on testimonials for them and testimony against them, both
versions may be true.

Pot Eased the Pain

Mollie Fry grew up as the daughter of Dr. Caroline Fry, a
sixth-generation family doctor, practicing Malibu nudist and notable
free spirit.

Fry said her mother raised her "with fire in my belly" and a passion
for medicine. She also passed down a history of breast cancer. At 10,
Fry saw her mother succumb to the disease "in the worst, most
frightening thing in my life."

In late 1997, Mollie Fry, having earned a medical degree from the
University of California, Irvine, was home-schooling her children in
a faded blue ranch house amid Ponderosa pines when she was diagnosed
with fast-advancing cancer. Surgeons removed both her breasts cutting
"down to the chest wall and the circulation," she says to save her life.

Terrified and deeply depressed, she said she endured five months of
chemotherapy, during which "I threw up and threw up and threw up."

A doctor told her marijuana might ease her nausea. It worked. Fry
says she "went from losing half a pound a day to maintaining a stable
weight." She says pot "made my mood better. It made me want to live."

California voters in 1996 approved Proposition 215, legalizing the
use of marijuana for medical conditions. But the rules were
ill-defined. Marijuana medicine was in its infancy and legal pot
wasn't easy to obtain.

Dale Schafer, a workers' compensation lawyer who represented police
officers in injury cases, drove his wife to San Francisco and the
Cannabis Buyers Club of Dennis Peron, an advocate who championed
Proposition 215.

The cannabis club doled out an eighth of an ounce of pot at a time.
The couple said Fry, sick from chemo and tormented by shooting pains,
found the journey intolerable. So her husband read up on pot growing
and planted marijuana behind their home near the mountaintop hamlet
of Georgetown. They found their medicine and their calling.

Clinic Draws a Following

It wasn't long before Fry's suffering offered a public face for
medicinal marijuana use.

In 1999, she appeared at the state Capitol, lighting glow sticks "for
the patients who were sick and dying because they couldn't have
medical marijuana."

The same year, Fry and Schafer opened the Whole Health Medical
Marijuana Research Center in Cool, including a physician's clinic and
legal office. They soon hosted the media in their pot garden.

Despite passage of Proposition 19, marijuana use remained a crime
under federal law. But courts affirmed physicians could recommend pot
without fear of prosecution as long as they didn't aid patients in
obtaining it.

Fry and Schafer charged $150 to $200 per person for medical marijuana
recommendations plus legal consultations as hundreds, eventually
thousands, of people came to the rural clinic.

They ran radio ads for a medicinal alternative to pills. "There is a
choice," the spots said. "Medical marijuana."

Fry said she started out seeing people with "diabetes and cancer and
rheumatoid arthritis." Soon her patients more often claimed sleeping
problems or chronic pain.

Fry felt she had a gift of understanding. "I could touch people," she
said, "where they were hurting."

Having perfected growing marijuana for his wife, Dale Schafer made a
fateful decision to provide pot for free, he insists to other patients.

"He was looking to solve the problem of people having to pay black
market prices," said Cool resident Mitch Fadel, who heads a medical
marijuana advocacy group founded by Fry and Schafer. "He was
disgusted with what patients were being forced to pay while driving
all the way to the Bay Area."

A Probe in Plain Sight

Convinced of the nobility of their mission, the couple invited El
Dorado County narcotics officers to their garden. When Detective
Robert Ashworth and a partner came in 1999, he said, he was greeted
by Fry, "a very emotional and very passionate person," and Schafer,
"a very likable person" who solicited his advice.

Schafer asked officers if the marijuana was an issue for federal
agents. "They told us the feds had no problem with what we were
doing. And when I told him I was going to give the medicine to sick
people, they said they had no problem with that," he said.

Ashworth, who noted in his report there were 21 pot plants on the
property that day, confirms he told them the feds weren't looking at
them because it was true at the time.

That changed after U.S. authorities contacted the El Dorado County
Sheriff's Department, saying marijuana was being sent out in UPS
packages under Schafer's name.

Ashworth continued visiting Fry and Schafer, now assisting the U.S.
government. He said he was under no obligation to tell them of the
federal drug probe.

"This was the best undercover operation I ever had," he said. "I
never had to hide the fact I was a policeman."

He made small talk with Schafer about the attorney's Little League
baseball team, even as he counted 43 marijuana plants in 2000, adding
them to the 1999 total. Under federal law, marijuana prosecutions can
be based on the number of plants observed over time. By 2001, that
total would edge past 100, making the couple vulnerable to extended
time in federal prison.

By then, authorities were probing a conspiracy larger than a backyard garden.

In early 2001, a real estate appraiser came to the house for an
inspection for a home refinance loan. Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean
Flynn said the appraiser found a concrete and cinder block bunker
filled "with so many marijuana plants he was frightened."

The appraiser drove to the first pay phone. He called police. "He
realized that he had come upon the property of drug dealers," Flynn said.

Federal authorities said Shafer and Fry were offering a marijuana
service, with the doctor recommending it and the lawyer providing it.

They said Schafer formed a business Cool Madness that sold $400 kits,
including marijuana seedlings, lights and growing materials. They
alleged that he distributed marijuana from his office at his wife's
practice and had couriers shuttle or mail it to paying customers.

In February 2001, federal prosecutors convicted two employees at the
medical clinic of growing marijuana. They offered them leniency in
exchange for cooperating in the probe of the doctor and lawyer.

Two Turn Informant

Mollie Fry was soon on guard for narcs posing as patients.

When a man looking like a cop came to her clinic, she guided him
through range of motion exercises and said: "OK, lift up your shirt
and let me see your wire."

Fry says she gave thorough exams and required medical records and a
lengthy questionnaire on patients' health histories before writing
marijuana recommendations.

But Ashworth said two undetected narcotics officers got them with no
records and little or no exam.

Authorities alleged that Fry and Schafer took in $750,000 to $1
million from 5,000 medical pot clients from Aug. 1, 1999 to September
28, 2001, when agents served warrants on their home and business.

Paul Maggy, one of two ex-clinic employees convicted of growing
marijuana, testified that it was a volume business as Fry urged staff
to bring in "a hundred patients a week." He said Schafer handed out
baggies of marijuana at the office and gave a pound of pot to a South
Lake Tahoe man, telling him to charge $45 per eighth of an ounce sold.

Michael Harvey, who tended the couple's marijuana gardens, said the
lawyer sent him to deliver pot and collect payments from customers
from Vallejo to the High Sierra. Harvey said he also mailed seven UPS
packages of marijuana at Shafer's behest.

Schafer said he only permitted charging $10 for gas and never
approved any mailings. He depicted Harvey and Maggy as rogue
employees who sold pot on their own and testified to save themselves.

But marijuana patient Jody Ann Bollinger recalls Schafer's oldest
daughter, Heather, now 35, calling to offer medicinal deliveries. She
said she bought pot from an employee who had her write a check to
Schafer and said, "If there were any questions, I could say it was legal fees."

Couple Reject Plea Deal

The investigation took off as California was still trying to sort out
its hazy rules for medical marijuana. And, in a conservative Mother
Lode county, it targeted two people who drew attention to themselves.

Fry shared her cancer story, touting the benefits of cannabis.
Schafer hosted a workshop on making pot cookies and even after the
couple's home was raided ran for district attorney as a medical
marijuana candidate.

They were indicted in June 2005 based on 110 marijuana plants 98
counted by Detective Ashworth and 12 others seized in 2001.
Prosecutors said they could have gone after the couple for 1,000
plants and seedlings.

The couple refused a plea deal of freedom for Fry and reduced time
for Schafer. "I married my husband for better or worse," Fry said,
sobbing in a recent interview. "I was not going to send him to prison."

Schafer's lawyer, Tony Serra, said an "ulterior motive to destroy the
state medical marijuana movement" lay behind their federal trial in
2007. Prosecutor Flynn said it was about a couple enriching
themselves, recommending pot and providing it "like pizza delivery."

After 10 days of trial, a jury convicted Fry and Schafer in less than
three hours.

Last year, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a bid to
void their convictions on grounds they were denied a medical
marijuana defense under state law and entrapped by officers who
failed to inform them their conduct was illegal.

Fry sold her practice in 2008 to another physician specializing in
marijuana medicine. In 2009, the state Medical Board put her license
on three-year probationary status and ordered her to get training and
a psychiatric exam. Schafer is now ineligible to practice law.

Marijuana advocates, who plan to mass Monday at the federal
courthouse in Sacramento, filed a clemency petition and sent it to
President Barack Obama on behalf of the couple and their five
children, the youngest now 18.

"They were not judged by an informed jury," said Jon Moore, a Garden
Valley nature photographer who got a marijuana referral from Fry for
pain from a broken neck. "I liken them to people found guilty for
stealing a boat to save a man from drowning."

Federal prosecutor Anne Pings scoffed at tributes for a couple who
broke the law and spurned a deal that could have spared them a
required five years in prison. "If they are martyrs, it is because
they have chosen to be martyrs," she said at their sentencing.

Long after their case began, medical marijuana in California exploded
into a massive industry of pot doctors and marijuana dispensaries.

Schafer suggests that he and his wife were "10 years ahead of our
time," and acted legally under state medical marijuana law. Fry
likened the couple's plight to that of Galileo, the 17th-century
astronomer sentenced to house arrest for defending the idea that the
sun is the center of the solar system.

Ashworth says they aren't seers. They were just a couple, he said,
"who went from a doctor and lawyer to drug dealers."