California Marijuana Clubs Remain Outlaws

SAN FRANCISCO (June 6, 1997 9:02 p.m. EDT) -- The strains of sitar music mingle with the smoke at the Cannabis Cultivators Club, a '60s-style bistro where the menu lists eight grades of "top quality" marijuana.

A glass counter displays the best sellers: marijuana-filled brownies and peanut butter cookies; "merry pills"; and rum bottles and glossy red-and-green boxes bearing the club's Phoenix and Amigo brands.

"We call it the pharmaceutical nightclub," said Tracy Williams, 30, who is paralyzed and often travels nearly 60 miles from his Santa Cruz home for the drug he smokes to ease his muscle spasms.

Since California legalized medical marijuana in November, the state's marijuana clubs have evolved from black market drug dens to bona fide cannabis retailers. They pay taxes, take bank cards and register patients.

But the state's ill-defined medical marijuana statute still makes outlaws of buyers clubs. And the patients -- who come in wheelchairs or on canes and often bear the purplish lesions that mark AIDS sufferers -- risk arrest daily in the effort to ease their pain.

"I've known two people who have been busted in the last few weeks," said San Franciscan Jay Segal, 48, who smokes marijuana to relieve the side effects of AIDS drugs. "The funny thing is that the right-wingers all say marijuana leads to crime. Look around you -- a lot of stoners laying on couches. This is crime?"

At least a dozen clubs have opened in California, including sites in Los Angeles, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, San Jose, Hayward, Marin and seven locations in San Francisco.

But the law's silence on key legal questions has led to widely varying enforcement from city to city, arrests of patients, federal agents threatening doctors, black market deals between growers and buyers clubs and the federal raid of a San Francisco club.

The November citizen referendum, Proposition 215, legalized marijuana possession by anyone with a doctor's recommendation. But transporting it -- even to the user's home -- remains illegal.

Authorities are grappling with such unanswered questions as whether smoking in clubs violates state anti-smoking statutes, whether cultivating the drug off club grounds remains a felony and whether sales between grower and club are illegal.

Even clubs that adhere to a conservative interpretation of the law by growing their supplies on the spot break the law by buying black-market seeds, according to state and federal authorities.

"Prop 215 is a mess," said Karyn Sinunu, assistant district attorney in charge of the Santa Clara County narcotics unit. "I don't know if the voters thought this stuff would fall from heaven or what, but that just wasn't addressed before this thing was passed."

Helen, 79, who asked that her last name not be used, risks a prison term each time she carries a bag of low-grade marijuana on the two-hour drive from the San Francisco club to her home in Sacramento. The marijuana cookies she bakes allow her 79-year-old husband, Norman, to sleep through the pain of a condition that leaves nerves exposed.

"At least he sleeps," she said, standing out in her neatly pressed suit near a customer in a Grateful Dead T-shirt and a shirtless man with necklace of cannabis leaves. "I don't care what the federal government says, it has helped this man."

Downstairs, club manager Dennis Peron talked to an intermediary about taking on a new supplier for the 40 pounds of marijuana the club's nearly 4,000 members go through each week. Asked if such deals are legal, he shrugged.

"The law's only been in effect for five months," said Peron, who led the state campaign to legalize medical marijuana. "The plant takes six months to grow. We're currently buying on the underground market."

Prosecutors in each region are making up the law as they go along.

In San Francisco, nearly everything goes. In San Jose, one of the city's two new pharmacy-like buyers clubs was closed under a zoning law that imposes similar restrictions on the location of adult bookstores. Prosecutors say state smoking law bans smoking at the remaining site. And suppliers in Santa Clara County risk felony drug charges because authorities there consider transportation of marijuana illegal.

Across the San Francisco Bay, the 1,100-member Oakland Cannabis Buyer's Club keeps a low profile. There is no sign at the club, which sells two to five pounds of cannabis each week, only a buzzer labeled "Oakland CBC" in a doorway wedged between a travel service and an employment office. Patients present photo membership cards at a pharmacy-style counter for their daily limit of one-quarter ounce.

"We don't want to be flagrant. We know we're changing society," said the club's proprietor, Jeff Jones, 22, whose father died of cancer when he was 14. "I just wish I could have done the same for my father."

The club works with a police liaison officer who calls an 800-number to verify members. Several buyers have been arrested but were later released, although officers have sometimes confiscated the drugs.

The difference between local views on the law pales in comparison to the gulf among, local, state and federal officials. State Attorney General Dan Lungren and Sacramento authorities say clubs don't qualify as the "primary caregivers" the law permits to cultivate the drug.

Federal law, unlike California law, finds no medicinal value in marijuana. Federal drug agents seized 331 plants at San Francisco's Flower Therapy club April 21 in what San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan called a "befuddling" raid of a legitimate business.

The Clinton administration has gone further, threatening to challenge the license of any doctor who recommends marijuana.

"So we have things like doctors saying, 'If I could prescribe it I would, but I'm not,"' said Ms. Sinunu, the narcotics prosecutor. "That's ridiculous."

By JOHN HENDREN, The Associated Press