THE CANNABIS CAPER

How A Citizen's Donation To NORML Got Routed To The DEA

Last month, Clayton Jones of Houston got his hands on a newsletter of
the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).
The 54-year-old paraplegic and double amputee believes that marijuana
should be legal for medicinal purposes. Finding kindred spirits at
NORML, he felt moved to send a contribution to the local chapter.

He duly filled out his membership information, scribbled out a check
for $10 and put it in the mail that same day. Jones was most
perplexed when a package arrived from the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration a week later.

He warily opened the manila envelope and found a succession of
smaller envelopes, like a Russian nesting doll. The first was
addressed to the DEA's Houston office, with Jones's name and address
scrawled in a neat but unfamiliar hand in the space at the top left
where the sender's information goes. Inside was Jones's original
letter to NORML, which had been opened but still contained his
membership information and check -- uncashed.

Who would feel compelled to open his private correspondence to
high-profile advocates of marijuana legalization and send it off to
the agency charged with smoking out users of the herb, he wondered
with rising anger.

"I feel very violated," he says.

Adding fuel to Jones's anxious ruminations is the fact that the DEA
has become increasingly heavy-handed in its crackdowns on the use of
medical marijuana. The agency, under the guise of homeland security,
recently staged a series of raids on medical marijuana cooperatives
in California, where state law allows pot for the seriously ill.

Jones took the package from the DEA to a leading reform group
mentioned in the NORML newsletter, the Drug Policy Forum of Texas. He
and the group's executive director, Alan Robison, studied the papers
like tea leaves, hoping to determine how the letter had gotten into
the hands of the feds.

The first thing they determined was that Jones had incorrectly
addressed his envelope. Instead of putting NORML's post office box,
he had written the Drug Policy Forum's building address at 1425
Blalock Road. In addition, he failed to enter the suite number,
making it all but undeliverable in a two-story building with about 20
different offices. That still didn't explain how it turned up at the
DEA.

The little coupon Jones had clipped from the newsletter and scrawled
his personal information on seemed to offer a clue. It so happened
that on the back of that square of paper was a snippet of vague
information about a planned "action" by NORML to protest a DEA
policy. The newsletter gave the address of the agency's building on
the West Loop.

Someone apparently wanted to tip off the federal agents about NORML's
intentions. But who?

Their suspicions turned to the postal service. The neatly written
envelope to the DEA had been stamped with a postage meter that
appeared to be the kind used by post offices. It seemed plausible to
Jones and Robison that in post-September 11 America, postal workers
saw themselves on the front lines of the nation's "wars" on terrorism
and drugs.

"Evidently the sneaky bugger in the post office.was trying to get
Jones in trouble or make a hero out of himself," said the Drug Policy
Forum's Robison, a distinguished professor of pharmacology and former
department chair at the University of Texas Health Science Center.

When informed of the situation, postal officials expressed doubt that
one of their employees would open a first-class letter and then
reroute it to some third party, like the DEA. Doug Turner, a postal
inspector in San Antonio and a regional spokesman, says such a move
would violate the "security and the sanctity of the mail" and
potentially constitute a felony.

"You can't just take a piece of mail and open it because you think
something's wrong with it. You have to have a search warrant to do
that," Turner says of postal service protocols. "If we find an
employee who is doing that, we will try to prosecute him every time."

In the Jones episode, such harsh measures proved unnecessary. It
turned out that a mail carrier apparently had committed an error, but
one that did not rise to the level of criminality. The carrier
mistakenly delivered Jones's letter to the office of a mortgage
company at 1425 Blalock, rather than returning it to Jones.

It was Joe Etheredge, president of Casa Mortgage Inc., who made the
decision to forward Jones's letter to the feds. Confronted in his
office with the facts, Etheredge, a man with twinkling blue eyes,
short gray hair and beard, thinks back for a moment and explains what
happened. Yes, he remembers the errant letter that arrived with the
stack of other mail that Tuesday afternoon in February. He recalls
slicing open the mail with the mechanical motions of a business owner
who receives piles of lien payments and other correspondence.

He doesn't look at the face of every envelope, he says, adding that
he pulled the contents from Jones's envelope and eyeballed them long
enough to know the letter wasn't for him.

"I had no idea that whatever was in there had anything to do with
NORML. I just gave it to one of the girls in the back and said,
'Here, forward this on. It got sent to the wrong address.' "

Etheredge says his assistant forwarded the mail to the DEA because
the agency's address was displayed prominently on the back of Jones's
membership coupon.

"She could have just as easily sent it back to him," he concedes.

The DEA received the letter at its West Loop offices and promptly
returned it to Jones.

"We're not concerned about what an organization like NORML is doing,
unless they're breaking the law," says Robert Paiz, spokesman for the
Houston office of the DEA. "We have enough responsibility monitoring
the illicit drug traffickers who are putting the hard drugs out on
the street."

Vanessa Kimbrough, a Houston postal service inspector, says the
episode is a straightforward case of an "operational error" by the
mail carrier who delivered Jones's letter to the wrong place. Robison
of the Drug Policy Forum of Texas is satisfied with that version of
events.

"It sort of takes the fun out of being in the middle of a murder
mystery," he quips.

For his part, Etheredge says his conscience is clear. He was "trying
to be nice" by forwarding the letter on to who he thought was the
intended recipient.

"I feel no responsibility for the fact that [Jones] misaddressed the
envelope," he says.

Jones concludes that his letter may indeed have fallen victim to a
comedy of errors. But he is not laughing. A onetime owner of a
machine shop, Jones was left paralyzed by a 1985 car wreck. In 1992,
circulation problems forced the amputation of both of his legs. A
longtime activist for the disabled, he lives in severe pain and finds
marijuana is an effective way to ease the suffering.

"I want to see marijuana laws change. It's a very good therapeutic
medicine," he says. "It isn't going to infringe on anyone else."