THE GRAY AREA ON MEDICAL GREENERY

SUMMIT COUNTY - Dave Schreiner was a church deacon and Boy Scout leader in
Ohio for 25 years before moving to Summit County in 1999. Now, what
occupies his mind - besides his wife, children, bills and the typical
family travails - is growing marijuana.

Born with congenital defects in both femurs, Schreiner has been addled by
pain since his teenage years. He has spent monthlong stints in the hospital
in full-body casts. He has endured more than 20 surgeries, leaving more
than a dozen rods, plates and pins affixed to and drilled into his bones.
He even broke both femurs while in physical therapy. A lifetime of weak
legs has also thrown his back out of alignment, requiring more doctors. And
six years ago, he suffered a heart attack.

"I'm in constant pain, all the time," Schreiner said. "The surgeries are
trauma."

The list of medications doctors prescribe to deal with the pain - and the
conditions of which the pain is a symptom - is long and expensive. It
includes slow-release morphine pills, the narcotic Oxycontin, epidurals and
more. Some might question Schreiner's need for marijuana given his regimen
of intoxicants, but he explains, "They make me sick if I don't smoke."

So, three years ago, he got his first medical marijuana card. Lacking space
in their Summit Cove home, Schreiner's growing operation took root in the
living room. He didn't like it, he says, as his older children couldn't
bring friends over and he had to lie to his younger kids' friends and say
they were tomato plants.

There was no fooling adults, though, and Summit County's Drug Task Force
soon received a tip about "grow lights" glowing in the living room of
Schreiner's house. It was a spring night, just over a year ago, as the
Schreiner family was sitting down to dinner, when there came a knock at the
door. Schreiner knew the officer - their children attended school together
- - and was shocked when presented with a search warrant.

"They all had big guns," Schreiner said. "They said they got a search
warrant based on the color of the high-pressure sodium lights they could
see from the street. They pulled us out on the deck. I showed them my card
right away. I thought they should have stopped right there, but they
searched through the house anyway."

Schreiner's wife gave the task force a copy of Colorado's medical marijuana
law. The officers retreated to confer with lawyers and the court. In the
end, the Drug Task Force left after filming and recording Schreiner's
apparatus and plants. "It was kind of odd leaving there empty-handed,"
Sheriff John Minor would later say. "We'd never encountered that situation
before, and we really didn't know what to do."

To put it lightly, the intrusion irked Schreiner and his family. The
neighborhood was talking about it, and the Schreiners worried about their
children having to deal with it. His medical history, once confidential,
now had to be offered as explanation and excuse. He feels the whole ordeal
was unnecessary.

The Schreiners moved to Lake County within a few months. They found a
bigger house - plenty of room for the kids, without having to play around
dad's growing operation - and felt relatively anonymous. But Leadville
police came knocking at the door a month later, showing their search
warrant, looking for a drug dealer. Again, the Schreiners showed the
medical marijuana card and a copy of the law.

"I'm pissed," Dave Schreiner said. "I feel like they should be able to do
more background checks, more detective work to figure out that, 'Hey, we're
going after the wrong guy.'"

His wife, Deb, added: "The only way we can protect ourselves is to go to
them. And we shouldn't have to do that."

'Doug' Let's call this guy "Doug." Even though the state has given him the
legal approval to grow and use marijuana for medical reasons, he's still
not comfortable putting his name into the public domain. And when he's not
afraid, he's just angry.

Doug used to be an airplane pilot, until the doctors diagnosed him with
multiple sclerosis. As the disease has progressed, his employment
opportunities have degraded, as his balance, overall wellness and vision
have deteriorated. When his "attacks" are bad, for example, he goes blind
in his left eye.

Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disorder. The body, in biochemical
confusion, attacks itself, mistaking healthy tissue and systems for foreign
invaders. With Doug, the attacks of late manifest in the myelin, or
protective coating, surrounding his left optic nerve.

The thing that seems to work best in fighting the attacks, the tremors and
the rest is not, however, the doctor-prescribed injection of Avonex he
takes twice a week. Nor is it the other Federal Drug
Administration-accepted medications doctors suggest. The natural stuff
works the best, Doug says.

He keeps to a painstaking diet, heavy on natural foods and gluten-free
products. He doesn't drink or use tobacco. The injections help maintain his
immune system, but he'll "turn to pot before anything the FDA has
approved." He tries to stay even-keeled, as stress is the likeliest trigger
for an attack.

It doesn't always work. He's getting divorced. He gets agitated thinking
about all the money his parents must spend to support him, when all he
wants is to be a productive man. So he sits in Summit Cove, watching
History Channel documentaries, with all day to think, trying not to think
because that's what starts the buzzing in his nervous system, wondering as
he packs his marijuana pipe if this is the time when his vision in that
left eye won't return.

To say he's occasionally possessed by fits of blind rage would be
metaphorically, and literally, correct. But it wouldn't capture the irony:
Lately, stress weighs on him like a jumbo jet, because he's afraid of
police officers showing up at his door, taking away the thing that seems to
help the best. Doug is one of Summit County's 15 residents with a medical
marijuana card, and he's afraid of the county's Drug Task Force.

"There's a fine line between terrorism and tyranny," Doug said in a recent
interview in the living room of his home, where there is a computer
print-out of the Bill of Rights taped above the couch, the important
amendments about freedoms and privacy within pointing range. "They both
wear black masks."

Doug has watched over the past year as local law enforcement agencies have
made headlines. It's the raids that scare him: Police holding a family at
gun-point over a stolen car they had nothing to do with; a Frisco couple's
home ransacked in a fruitless search for a meth lab; and marijuana growing
operations seized - or not, in the case of at least two more false alarms.

Unable to take the stress and the uncertainty anymore, Doug went to law
enforcement himself. He called on the sheriff, told him what he'd find at
Doug's house and asked him point-blank if he had anything to worry about.

"They said they wouldn't be coming to my house," Doug said. "But I'm not
sure I believe them."

Unknown to Doug at the time, some of Summit County's other medical
marijuana patients were having similar lapses in faith.

The Catch-22 Colorado voters approved medical marijuana in November 2000,
becoming one of 10 states in the country with some sort of law on the books
allowing use of the illegal substance.

Colorado's Amendment 20 created a medical marijuana registry program,
administered by the Department of Public Health and Environment. Under the
law, a person (both adults and minors) can apply to be put on the registry
with approvals from physicians who concur that the patient suffers from a
debilitating condition (cancer, glaucoma, HIV/AIDS, spasms, seizures and
chronic pain are among the approved) and that marijuana would provide some
relief for the patient's specific situation.

The law states that patients with a valid medical marijuana card can
possess up to two ounces of a usable form of marijuana (as well as the
paraphernalia to use it). The patient can grow marijuana, with a total of
six plants, three or less in the flowering stage. Caregivers, who go
through a similar approval process and are listed on the card, are
permitted to possess, obtain and grow for patients, as well.

The application includes a $110 fee (it was $140 when the program was
created), not counting the costs for the medical visits and other
evaluations that must accompany the application.

According to local card-holders, those costs can total as much as $1,200.
The cards expire after one year and must be renewed.

What the law does not provide, however, is any knowledge about how to grow
marijuana, advice or explanation on how to obtain it if not growing it, or
the names of any people who could help with that. There is no information
about whether different strands of the plant work better for different
health conditions.

"If a person's not into that side of the world, how do they obtain it?"
Schreiner asks.

Schreiner, who gained some horticultural experience studying forestry and
botany, considers himself somewhat of a green thumb. It's obvious to him,
and others, that the people who wrote Colorado's medical marijuana law
aren't as knowledgeable. That's because, even with what he knows, the
limitations on the number of plants means there's always a risk of running out.

Some people grow marijuana like any other garden plant - with potting soil,
fertilizers and light. Some grow it hydroponically, using water as a medium
for nutrients instead of dirt. Some grow it from seeds, others from
"clones," cuttings or shoots from an already mature plant. As any gardener
knows, numerous variables, which if not monitored regularly and attended
to, can kill plants.

So, between the time it takes to grow a plant to maturity and the
difficulty in nurturing plants in a mountain environment, a card-holder who
grows the legal six plants might not get them all to produce sufficient
quantities of marijuana.

"I could have 10 clones and might only have two of them survive to
maturity," Schreiner says. "And when you're talking about a process that
takes three to four months, that's a big gamble if it doesn't work out."

Doug is trying to get his growing system to the point where he can harvest
from one plant every couple weeks or so, to avoid those gaps where he is
not producing or runs out. He's not quite there yet, though.

He points to a mason jar containing dried and cured pot on his coffee
table. There is a little under an ounce of bud. "But this is going to have
to last me until mid-June," he says. "That's not going to work."

In cases such as this, if there are no other card-holders or caregivers to
turn to, the patients are faced with a choice: Go without or go get it
illegally.

Neither does the law address the fact that many people who would need and
want medical marijuana and would qualify for a card don't have the
resources or the physical ability to grow it.

Charlie (last name withheld by request) lives in Summit County, supported
by disability payments. Like any other High Country resident, his living
space is small and expensive. He doesn't have the space or the wherewithal
to grow his own.

"I have to go to Denver and get it off the street," he said.

"They offered me any pill I wanted, but they wouldn't let me smoke my
medical marijuana," he said.

Matteo's girlfriend, Betty, has watched as a police car has parked outside
their condo and an officer surveys the area, sniffing the air.

She doesn't like the smell of the marijuana smoke, so asks Matteo to smoke
on the porch, or blow smoke out the front door. She worries about riding
with Matteo in the car, someone calling police because they see him
smoking, and what will happen to her if the officer learns she is not
listed on the medical marijuana card.

Their grower, Ben (last name withheld by request), lives in Boulder.

He moved out of Summit County, partly due to the space and cost issues, but
also because his landlord tried to have him evicted and arrested when he
found out Ben was growing marijuana.

The landlord threatened to call police so often, Ben says, he went ahead
and called them himself. First, he says, a detective was very understanding
and said there wouldn't be a problem. But when the detective went on
vacation, a sergeant picked up the case and was prepared to come rip up the
plants. In the end, once Ben had argued his points, the department decided
it was strictly a civil matter between the tenant and landlord.

"The police need to be really educated on the issue," Ben said. "They've
got it in their mind it's prelude to legalization, and they're against it.
It's a mind-set."

In an ongoing case that began in Rifle, a judge is weighing charges against
a woman whose home was raided by the Two Rivers Drug Enforcement Team.
Officers seized 131 marijuana plants; her caregiver status allowed her to
have up to 30 plants, and the woman claims that only 20 of the plants were
viable.

Despite provisions in the medical marijuana law that order law enforcement
agencies to wait for a judge's decision when medical marijuana plants are
seized, the drug enforcement team destroyed most of the plants. The task
force commander and an officer admitted under oath in the proceedings in
9th District Court in Glenwood Springs that they knew they were violating
the law, but that putting the plants in evidence storage to rot posed a
health hazard.

"This is very difficult for us," said Summit County Sheriff John Minor.
"It's something we're still trying to understand."

The sheriff points out that, in taking his job as the county's top law
enforcement officer, he swore an oath to uphold the Constitution of his
country and the state of Colorado. The problem is that, while Colorado's
Constitution has authorized medical marijuana, the federal government has
not. Just as medical marijuana card-holders are given no instruction on
dealing with the gray area in the law, Colorado law enforcement agencies
are left wondering what to do themselves.

The sheriff's ambiguity doesn't help the card-holders relax. They worry
about being put on a "watch list," or having their names sent to the Drug
Enforcement Agency (Minor says he can't give that information unless
federal agents ask for it). They are forced to take risks, the card-holders
say, any time they travel out of Colorado to another state that doesn't
have a medical marijuana law.

This contradiction could also be having a direct effect on participation in
Colorado's program. In addition to concerns about the gray areas in the
law, the state reports that many doctors are reluctant to recommend or sign
off on medical marijuana because of the discrepancy between state and
federal laws.

"It just doesn't make sense," says Matteo's girlfriend Betty. "It's not
illegal but you can't buy it on the street. We can go to California to get
some where it's legal, but can't be in the states between here and there.
Who says, 'You can't have your heart medicine because you're in Ohio?' And
when you're already in a compromised position - like blind, in a wheelchair
- - and you have to take more risks, it's scary. Very scary."

In a case argued last year before the high court, a California woman sued
the government after federal agents confiscated marijuana plants from her
yard. The Supreme Court decided against medical marijuana distributors in a
case four years ago that sought protection from federal laws. This case
will determine if agents have the authority to pursue cases against
individual patients in states with legalized marijuana. The court could
rule on the case as early as Monday.

An involuntary advocate Federal agents might come looking for Dave
Schreiner, and he's afraid of that, but he can't stand idly by anymore. He
knows there are other people out there like himself - in pain, in fear and
running out of time - and they shouldn't have to be. So he's starting a
support group.

Schreiner says he's met too many people who have relatives that would
qualify for medical marijuana, but they don't know how to get information
about it. They're embarrassed to ask their doctor or worried about the
stigma if the neighbors find out.

No one should have to go through what he's gone through with police, he
says. He wants to make sure that current card-holders can learn how to
grow, know where to get the materials and, if they can't, can get in touch
with someone who can grow for them.

Schreiner says people with disabilities and health conditions need support
from their peers. Such a group would give them a chance to vent, share
stories and learn about new treatments or medicines. There's also a
shortage of information about the different medicinal properties of various
strands of marijuana, he says.

It's an idea that's already piquing the interest of card-holders.

"It's a good idea, especially up there," says Ben, who's forming a group of
fellow veterans in Boulder to push for legalizing growing marijuana.
"People need to coalesce and educate the community. Otherwise, the cops
will just keep busting people and let the courts sort it out."

Schreiner wishes he didn't have to do this. He worries about the stigma
affecting his children once his picture is in the newspaper.

The legacy he wanted to leave them was not medical marijuana reform. But
now he feels as though maybe this is what he was meant to do.

"There has to be a reason why I spent all this time in church, in Scouts, a
reason why I'm going through all this pain," he said. "The reason is
because I'm supposed to bridge the gap. I'm not going to hide anymore. This
is my quest."

For more information on a medical marijuana support group, contact
Schreiner at (970) 389-2107.