ABOUT SCHMIDT

Robert "Duke" Schmidt, 52, sits in a small room in a Tenderloin
halfway house looking out at the unattainable entrance to Original
Joe's and -as we pan across Taylor St.- a big billboard showing
8-year-old Ashley Epis and her "My Dad is not a Criminal" sign.

"Medical Marijuana," proclaims the billboard, "Compassion -Not Federal
Prison." Says Schmidt, "I asked God for a sign. I'm serious.

In my moment of despair, I asked God for a sign, and the next day,
there was that sign."

Schmidt and his federal public defender are due to appear before U.S.
District Judge Charles Breyer on March 5 to face a charge that carries
a 10-year mandatory minimum: cultivation of more than 1,000 plants,
the most serious charge that Ed Rosenthal faced.

Whereas Ed thought he had authority from Section 885(d) of the
Controlled Substances Act, Schmidt cites an even higher source: "And
God said, 'Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is
upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit;
you shall have them for food.'" Genesis 1:29 -that verse-is the name
of the non-profit established by Schmidt in 1999 to grow and
distribute cannabis at his home in a working-class Petaluma
neighborhood.

"After Prop 215 passed I saw on the TV news what looked like Mexican
marijuana being sold at a club," Schmidt recalls. "I figured this was
an invitation for the federal government to come in. But if you could
grow it in California and distribute it to patients in California
- -with no interstate or international commerce involved-you would be
operating lawfully." On this rock he founded his dispensary.
Membership doubled, approximately, every year, until it exceeded 1,200
in the late summer of 2002, when Schmidt was busted by the feds.
"More and more people kept coming to me," says Schmidt, "mostly in
their 40s and 50s, people coping with chronic pain. Some were even
sent by the Sonoma County drug diversion program."

In 2000 and 2001 Schmidt supplemented his homegrown with cannabis produced
on a plot he had rented in Piercy (Mendocino County). He also came to rely
on other growers -very selectively, he says. "I set high standards for
them. To work with me you couldn't have a side agenda -you could only be
producing for the medical market. I didn't want to be associated with
people who were growing for any other purpose. And you yourself couldn't be
involved with alcohol or any other drugs. If you had a little problem with
cocaine or methamphetamine, you could not work with my group."

Schmidt says that he informed the state Attorney General's office of
his activities. "For three seasons I told them in advance what I was
going to plant, I updated them during the growing season, and I
reported how much I harvested. The first two years I met with David
De Alba [AG Bill Lockyer's point man for implementing the medical mj
law]. The third year I met with Scott Thorpe because De Alba had been
named a judge.

In fact I met with Scott Thorpe about 30 days before my arrest. I
took my son Ryan and introduced him as the new operator of Genesis,
which had grown so large that I couldn't maintain the integrity of
plant production and run an office serving 1,200 patients at the same
time."

The Genesis dispensary was open only during the day, when most of
Schmidt's neighbors weren't around, but eventually there were
complaints about the traffic and the odor of marijuana.

In the spring of '02 Schmidt rented a house on Martin Lane in
Sebastopol that had a large field behind it, and he also rented
office space on South Point, near the DMV. "I did patient registration
there and in the back we did our clerical work. I had acquired an
Evaporator and developed a method of separating out the THC and
determining what percentage of a given plant was THC. Bill Hyde, my
patent attorney, had applied for federal patents for the extraction
process, which could evaluate the THC content of standard strains like
Northern Lights, MC-33s, AK-47 -that's not a reference to the firearm,
it stands for Afghan-Kush cross, 47 days to mature. By getting
feedback from patients we realized that certain strains seemed better
for treating certain conditions. Some were best for appetite.

Some for painkiller. Some for sleep disorders. I found a strain with
mild stimulant properties that enabled me to work almost 20 hours a
day, seven days a week."

Like Ed Rosenthal and other suppliers of cannabis to medical users,
Schmidt had an ambitious but straightforward goal: to develop
standardized plant strains with known cannabinoid contents and study
their impacts on patients with various conditions. It's obvious to
anybody who has given medicinal cannabis any thought that that's the
work that needs to be done, and neither the U.S. government nor the
major drug companies are doing it (with the exception of G.W.
Pharmaceuticals in England.) As Schmidt put it in one of several
applications he filed with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration,
"It is the intent of Genesis Research Group to develop well
characterized drug substance and document patient input to develop
efficacy correlations between the chemical components of the cannabis
plant for different clinical indications."

Schmidt says he was inspired to seek DEA approval after a manufacturer of
fine hemp papers, John Stahl, told him about DEA registration form 225.
"It's an application to manufacture and distribute scheduled drugs," says
Schmidt. "I filed an application, and the DEA issued me a receipt." Among
the federal officials he told about his Genesis operation was Rep. Maxine
Waters, whom he met at a Democratic Party convention in San Jose in 1999.
As Schmidt describes that episode, "Some people representing Gore wanted
the hemp plank removed from the platform. They thought the m-word would
jeopardize his chances. John Stahl and I reworded it to refer to 'all
annual bast fiber crops' and resubmitted it. Nancy Pelosi was the referee,
and she bought the bargain. Maxine Waters was very supportive because at
that time I was providing cannabis to the club in Ingleside, California,
which they were never able to pay for -they'd been ripped off and had other
problems. God had blessed me so well as a grower of marijuana, that it
seemed like the more that I gave away, the more I received."

At the time of his arrest, Schmidt says, Genesis was charging $300 an
ounce, and $30-$35 an eighth "-lower than any club I knew of... The
crop we were growing would have lasted us a year."

The DEA raided Schmidt's house in the early morning hours of Sept. 12,
2002, And arrested him (only) as son Ryan looked on in handcuffs.

Schmidt attempted to wrestle the rifle away from the agent who had
awakened him with a prod of the barrel -for which he is also charged
with assault on an officer in the line of duty. "My post-traumatic
stress disorder is triggered by having guns pointed at me," says
Schmidt, "especially when I'm woke up with one in my face."

The DEA also confiscated an alleged 2,600 plants from Schmidt's place
in Sebastopol. Schmidt says he was counting on the 2002 harvest to
enable him to pay off his creditors, mainly the local Ford dealership,
which had leased him a pick-up truck, tractor and other farm equipment
without a down payment. "I don't know if it's because old Henry Ford
himself built a car out of cannabis, but the Dodge dealer had offered
to call the police on me, and the Chevrolet dealer said I was crazy,
but the salesman at Henry Curtis Ford pulled out the first-time buyer
plan and said 'Sign right here, Robert.' I was only window shopping
that day, I had no money; but I drove away in a Ford pick-up truck."

The jury that found Rosenthal guilty of cultivation (as well as
conspiracy and maintaining a grow-op) determined the amount to be not
the 3,000+ plants alleged by the feds, but fewer than 100, which
carries "only" a five-year mandatory minimum. Ed's lawyers had given
the jurors a basis to lower the total by challenging the number of
rooted plants seized at his warehouse, and the definition of a viable
plant.

But Ed was growing cloned seedlings, whereas Schmidt was growing big,
healthy outdoor plants. "The place looked like a Christmas tree
farm," Schmidt recalls... And Ed, by dint of his savvy and status as a
writer/publisher, and his connections, and his fundraising ability,
and his 30-year involvement in the cause, and his loving family and
extensive support system, etc. etc. -not to mention his Bronx
charm-had unique resources to bring to his court fight. And he was a
nonviolent first offender, somebody about whom a repentant juror could
declare, "Ed Rosenthal is not a criminal."

Robert Schmidt, however, does not have a middle-class aura or a
private-sector lawyer, and he has, in fact, done time in federal prison.

In the 1970s, in love with marijuana and licensed as a tugboat pilot,
he began running large loads from Colombia to Florida and, later,
Louisiana. "It was a mistake of youth and I know it, and I've paid my
debt to society," says Schmidt. "All I can say in my own defense is
that I was offered a lot of money to run guns, and more money to run
cocaine, to run heroin, and I always turned it down. My interest was
always marijuana."

Schmidt was born and raised on Put In Island in Lake Erie. His father
was a tugboat captain, then a boatbuilder. "Boats were second nature
to me," he says. "The sea, no matter how bad it got in a storm, I knew
how to work a boat through it." He was turned on to marijuana in the
late '60s by Midwest college students vacationing at Great Lakes resorts.

He helped ferry a few of them to Canada (instead of Vietnam). Somebody
suggested that his skills could be put to use bringing marijuana in
from Colombia, and he headed south -a move he now calls "accepting the
fallacies of youth."

Schmidt remembers the Paraquat days: "In 1978 there was more than 12
million acres of land in South America growing the finest cannabis
sativa. One morning when we were loading up and getting it ready for
transport to the coast, we noticed a lot of American C-140 aircraft
flying overhead.

Then the sky became orange, the whole valley was orange with the
defoliant they were dropping.

We had a DC-3 there and the wings were so heavy with this spray that
it would not lift off. We pulled our t-shirts over our heads, we
grabbed what stuff we had baled up, and we made it to the coast. It
took us four days overland. When I got back to the United States I
asked, 'When did we declare war on Colombia?' Everybody was wondering
what I was talking about. That area now is all heroin fields and coca
fields."

In 1980 Schmidt pled guilty to bringing in 2,780,000 pounds of
marijuana between 1973-78. He did only two years at Milan federal
penitentiary in Michigan because he had something the government
wanted in a trade: knowledge of how he had avoided them on the high
seas. (He had a scanner monitoring every Coast Guard cutter, and when
they headed into port, he shot over their wake.)

Flashback to the present Although, as noted, Schmidt lacks some of
the resources Ed Rosenthal was able to draw upon, he also has some of
the same strengths, including:

* a strong ego;

* an shakeable belief that what he was doing was righteous, that he was
serving others and reducing the sum total of pain and suffering in his
community;

* a devotion to the cannabis plant, a sense that growing it is his calling
in life;

* an argument that state and local law enforcement officials were aware of
his operation and tacitly approved -probably inadmissible, but highly
significant to Schmidt, who arranged annual meetings with California
Department of Justice officials to update them on his operation.

He even had paperwork from the DEA -receipts from his application for
a license to cultivate.

And Schmidt will have an advantage Ed Rosenthal didn't: the publicity
around the Rosenthal case. Almost everyone who's been paying
attention knows that the jurors who convicted Ed felt misled,
railroaded, and remorseful. It may only be a matter of time before
citizens seeking to throw a wrench into the drug-war machinery get
seated on juries by telling the judge, "I can set my feelings aside"
while thinking, "but that doesn't mean I will."

Add Decent DAs

Humboldt County District Attorney Paul Gallegos will
discuss his approach to implementing the marijuana laws at a forum
Saturday, Feb. 15, 2-5 p.m., at the Mateel Center in Redway. Author
Chris Conrad, who has appeared as an expert witness in numerous
cannabis cultivation cases, will also take part. The event is being
organized by Americans for Safe Access (www.safeaccessnow.org). For
more information call 707-923-7292. fe