U.S. DRUG NET SNARES STATE-BACKED GROWER

OAKLAND, Calif. - Ed Rosenthal is saddled with two public images these
days. The first Ed is the soccer dad who wears Eddie Bauer slacks and
pads around his Victorian home in socks and sandals; the second Ed is
the convicted drug kingpin who faces five years in the pen for having
thumbed his nose at the U.S. government.

Ed's fans embrace the first image. But Ed's detractors tend to carry
guns and badges, and that is why his time as a free man is dwindling
toward zero.

"I want to stay out of jail," he said, because he knows what jail
would mean. No more Grateful Dead CDs on his kitchen boom box. No more
time in the greenhouse with his rare orchids. No more quick jaunts
with his wife, Jane, to concerts and gallery openings. No more San
Francisco skyline glinting silver in the distance. No more hugs from
total strangers who think he's starring in a nightmare scripted by
Franz Kafka.

And no more growing marijuana for sick people to smoke - which is why
the feds took him down. Miffed by the fact that he was nurturing
hundreds of plants in an Oakland warehouse near the docks, they busted
him a year ago (he opened the door naked at 6 a.m., and saw 15 police
officers armed to the teeth). They convicted him a month ago, and they
intend to sentence him - five years, mandatory minimum - this spring.

More important, they are waging a national war against medical
marijuana, running roughshod over the nine states that have legalized
it - and Rosenthal is the prize casualty. They view marijuana as a
scourge, with no exceptions. They're not impressed that Rosenthal had
been cultivating starter plants for 3 1/2 years as a deputized city
official. They want to send the message that a 58-year-old man with a
son at Columbia and a daughter in private school is no better than a
street dealer.

Rich Meyer, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, said: "Marijuana
is illegal, period. And marijuana is not medicine. We can't just obey
the laws that we like, because that's a recipe for chaos."

Created a Martyr?

Californians, who legalized marijuana for sick people in a 1996
referendum, have discovered that the Bush administration has no
intention of respecting their decision. The DEA has been raiding the
pot dispensaries - most notably last autumn in Santa Cruz, after which
the mayor, as a protest, personally handed out marijuana to medical
patients on the steps of City Hall - and a dozen medical-marijuana
growers in the state have been convicted in federal court.

But, in Rosenthal's case, the feds may have created a martyr to the
cause. They convicted him as a common drug dealer without allowing
jurors to hear any evidence that he was growing pot for medical
reasons (because federal law doesn't recognize medical use). For that
reason, nearly half the jurors have renounced their own verdict.

In her kitchen, juror Marney Craig said: "What I saw in court was a
nice Jewish man who could be a friend of mine. It feels horrible to
have been so manipulated. We have to live with the knowledge of what
we've done to Ed. And what about the voters of California, passing
medical marijuana? How can [Washington] come in and say, 'Your opinion
doesn't count for anything'?"

Rosenthal seems pleased with his status of cause celebre. People hug
him on the street. He drives up in his silver Cougar, and he's treated
like Sinatra at the Copa. When he shows up at the pot dispensaries in
downtown Oakland, sick people in wheelchairs roll by to pay their
respects. Plant-lovers accost him, speed-rapping about "cannabinoid
receptors" and other fine points of growing.

Too Juicy a Target

Rosenthal is reliving the 1960s and digging it. He refers to his
plight as "the ultimate phase of activism - like the Berrigan
brothers," invoking the Roman Catholic priests who were jailed for
their antiwar actions. He thinks he's a classic symbol of what can go
wrong when "fanatic ideologues" in Washington try to prevent the
states from making their own decisions about the health of their citizens.

He now has five lawyers trying to keep him out of jail, and he insists
that "the fickle finger of fate just happened to stop at my door." But
that's not exactly true. Co-owner with his wife of a publishing
company, he has been writing for decades, in books and magazines,
about marijuana cultivation. He openly believes that pot should be
legal, that the current laws "are hollow and rotten to the core," and
that the medical-marijuana battle could soften the public for a
subsequent legalization crusade.

Well, that kind of talk is catnip to the DEA, which answers to an
antidrug hard-liner, Attorney General John Ashcroft. (Although
Ashcroft's boss, President Bush, did say as a candidate in 1999 that,
on the issue of legalizing medical marijuana, "each state can choose
that decision, as they so choose.") Rosenthal was too juicy a target
to pass up.

DEA agent Meyer said: "If someone is going to say, 'I want to grow all
the pot I want, and here are my books about it,' - well, thank you,
sir, for making my job easier. If you want to be such an advocate, you
shouldn't be surprised if we pay you a visit... . And Rosenthal makes
it clear that 'medical marijuana' is just a beachhead for the larger
attempt to make this drug legal."

As for the jurors' complaints that they were denied crucial evidence
about Rosenthal's true identity, Meyer said: "In our system, the jury
sees whatever is deemed legally appropriate. They saw everything they
were entitled to see. That's our legal system. It's all we have, for
better or worse."

But the ticked-off jurors are writing a letter to the judge, imploring
him to find a way around the five-year mandatory minimum sentence.
Jury foreman Charles Sackett, sipping tea the other day, said: "A lot
of us didn't eat or sleep for a week after the trial. I've been
devastated that I wasn't given the whole truth. It's totally appalling
that they can bend and twist things. They expected me to play fair as
a juror, but they weren't playing fair with us."

Expect to see some of these jurors testifying on Capitol Hill soon;
three California congressmen, including one conservative Republican,
are pushing a bill that would permit a "medical defense" in federal
marijuana cases that are prosecuted in states where the drug is
dispensed. (Maryland is currently debating whether to become the 10th
state. The Republican governor supports the concept of pot as pain
reliever, in part because his brother-in-law recently died of cancer.)

Meanwhile, Oakland's dispensaries remain open, seemingly undeterred by
the Rosenthal case. But Meyer said: "They should not be surprised at
all if we pay them a visit."

As for Rosenthal, who would prefer his denim jacket to prison scrubs,
he's trying to see the humor in all this: "When my son first got into
Columbia, I told him to go meet Meadow. You know who I mean - Meadow
Soprano, who goes to Columbia on The Sopranos. Whose father is a crime
kingpin, always in trouble with the feds. But now I've come to
realize, my son is Meadow."