CRUSHING YOUR LOCAL CANNIBIS COLLECTIVES

Feds Use Asset-Forfeiture Laws to Spell Evictions for Medical-Pot Providers

White House drug czar John P. Walters isn't a figure to command awe, so rhetoric had some considerable slack to transcend.

Out in Redding last Thursday, July 12, to bestow federal benediction on a National Guard/Shasta County pot-eradication drive, the director of the Office of National Drug Policy called on America to overcome its "reefer blindness" and realize the marijuana plants destroyed by Operation Alesia were sewn on its own public land by "violent criminal terrorists." The meme was the message as Walters gave the money quote another airing: "Don't buy drugs," he declared. "They fund violence and terror."

This was nice fodder for a news cycle festooned with dire warnings from second-string federal officials regarding terrorism.

Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff had already gone Walters one better the day before by publicly reading his own entrails, citing an unspecified "gut" feeling the nation was due another pounding by terrorists. Shasta County authorities still have several days' worth of weed-pulling ahead before Alesia winds down, but last week also saw another front quietly open in the federal government's 70-year war on marijuana: the legal cannibis collectives of Los Angeles.

Among the less obtrusive inhabitants of the city's retail space, cannabis collectives have survived fitful local persecution to prevail and multiply, allowing patients access to medication in a controlled environment, often one at a time. "Isn't that amazing?" notes Chris Fusco, L.A. Country Field Coordinator of national advocacy group Americans for Safe Access. "You drive by them constantly and never know they're there! That's not such a bad thing. Collectives should be discreet. They're medical concerns, and there's no reason they should be out there in your face."

A high-profile federal prosecution of the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Center ended in late 2003 with farcically light sentences for three defendants and an openly skeptical Judge A. Howard Matz snorting from the U.S. District bench over a "badly misguided" prosecution case. Local patients suffering from AIDS, cancer, epilepsy, glaucoma, Crohn's Disease, and other debilitating conditions were free to seek relief in legal marijuana, creating a boomlet of around 200 clinics and collectives in L.A. County.

The feds stepped in last week with a flurry of letters to landlords of collectives reminding them of federal preeminence over state law, a possible 20-year prison term, and the unhappy implications of Title 21, U.S. Code 881(e), the assets-forfeiture statute.

But as special Agent Sarah Pullen of the DEA reminds me, "They're ongoing investigations, so they're merely at this point to serve notice for the property owners that there are individuals there violating federal drug laws." Cheerful and businesslike, she describes the letters as primarily informative: "The main purpose is to educate property-owners that federal and state law do differ and they are operating in violation of federal law." Despite this, the DEA announced a spate of Southland arrests on the 17th, with two West Hollywood clinics among those targeted.

Some recipients overlooked this aspect of the letters, preferring to take the message as a less-than-subtle roust.

Some collectives are planning to shut their doors; these include Hollywood Compassionate Clinic, which has unobtrusively tended a small patient base since March of last year. "My landlord has a medical clinic right next door to me, and they're very well aware of what we do," says operator Lisa Sawoya. "They knew before we signed the lease. They've been very supportive. They don't want to see me go, but they're kind of forced into this. They're between a rock and a hard spot and doing what they need to do to protect their business interests."

"We'll be closing doors at the end of this month," she sighs, sounding like any other ill-used small business owner. "We're concerned about our patients. I was operating my dispensary as clean as possible. I'm paying the city my taxes for 18 months. My patients have been paying sales tax for the last 18 months. I have been abiding by everything I need to do, state-wise. We verify all our patients with the proper medical recommendation as well as the proper ID. If we didn't have that type of information, they were not let in the door."

The folks who open these collectives sound a lot less like blood-drenched narco-terrorists and closer to offbeat Rotarians, complete with local accreditation for collectives, locally adopted guidelines, and solid relations with local authorities in the form of the Medical Marijuana Working Group of Los Angeles, of which Sawoya is a member.

After having worked with "city attorneys, city planners, and the LAPD to help draft [dispensary] regulations for Los Angeles, I really feel like I'm a victim of the DEA's tactics now, and so is my landlord," she says.

"Who is the DEA to tell landlords who is and isn't a suitable tenant?" Sawoya asks. "This country was founded on property rights!"

Well, someone's property rights, at any rate. In a post-Kelo legal era, ancient concepts of meus et tuus have undergone some startling mutations. The 2005 Supreme Court decision left government with wide latitude to seize private property for "legitimate public purpose," broadly defined.

Bruce Mirken, director of communications for the Washington, D.C.-based Marijuana Policy Project, was glum. "The use of asset forfeiture isn't something they've done extensively before," he says. "What it looks like is an attempt to get landlords and property owners to do the DEA's dirty work for them by frightening them into evicting tenants that are providing medical marijuana to patients."

"We'll see how it it plays out," Mirken allows. "But it wouldn't surprise me to see it succeed in some cases. They are, after all, the federal government, with all the power that that entails. But, while they may win some battles, they've already lost the war. Medical marijuana is here, the science keeps verifying its value. There was another study just a couple of weeks ago about patients with AIDS. The public accepts it, three-quarters of California voters supported Prop. 215 [the Compassionate Use Act], more states keep passing medical marijuana laws. The feds can't stop this, but they can keep flailing away and hurt some innocent people. They can deny some patients access to their medicine or force them to go to street dealers instead of reputable providers," Mirken continues. "I can't imagine how anybody thinks that helps anyone. They can't stop medical marijuana any more than they could keep science from finding out the earth moves around the sun. But they can cause some damage along the way."

With local collective operators like Sawoya caught in the role of Galileo, what are the options for medical marijuana or even the expressed will of 56 percent of California voters who supported Prop. 215 more than a decade ago? "Congress needs to get off its collective rear end and put a stop to this, and California's congressional delegation needs to lead the way." Mirken says. "It just so happens that, some time within the next couple of weeks, they're gonna get an opportunity. Somewhere between now and early August, Congress is gonna consider the appropriations bill that funds the Justice Department, including your good friends at the DEA."

Jonathan Diamond, a spokesperson for the L.A. City Attorney's office, disavows interest in the matter, saying "This is not an issue our office would be involved in." Squeamish national Democrats will likely inch away from tarring themselves with a cannabis-resin brush, but every activist I spoke to, on the record and off, is immovably convinced medical marijuana is here to stay in California. From such a perspective, the DEA letters are but a rearguard action that will delay the inevitable at maximum human cost. How resistance to the proposed forfeitures might be waged, or if local officials will aid collectives, caregivers, and activists in any fight against the DEA, is at this point conjectural. What's certain is that the site of the contest will be the bodies of sick, pain-wracked Angelenos.