Pubdate: Wed, 28 Aug 2002
Source: Los Angeles Daily Journal (CA)
Contact:  2002 Daily Journals
Website: http://www.dailyjournal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1142
Author: Jeffrey Anderson
Note:  Title provided by MAP editor.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?115 (Cannabis - California)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)

CALIFORNIA MEDICAL MARIJUANA DISTRIBUTORS UNDER FIRE

Scott Imler decided to starve himself to death this summer to protest 
federal drug enforcement action against a cannabis club. After five days, 
he decided his death wouldn't provide an answer to his problems. Neither, 
so far, have the courts or law enforcement, which are locked in a death 
grip over the right of terminally or chronically ill patients to smoke 
marijuana, as provided by a state law and prohibited by the federal government.

Federal agents raided the West Hollywood headquarters of the Los Angeles 
Cannabis Resource Center on Oct. 25, 2001. They seized the club's 
computers, medical files, bank accounts and inventory -- 400 plants and 10 
pounds of harvested pot to serve the palliative needs of more than 900 
medical patients, 90 percent of who suffer from cancer or AIDS. Imler uses 
medical marijuana to diminish his suffering from post-traumatic epileptic 
seizures. He had worked closely with city officials to set up the center 
and had earned a reputation among advocates as a stickler for detail who 
closely adhered to the mandates of local law enforcers.

Within seven months, Imler learned he was under federal investigation for 
distribution of drugs. The Drug Enforcement Agency and the Internal Revenue 
Service had filed federal forfeiture actions against the center's $1.2 
million building and its assets, including $55,000 in employee bank 
accounts the feds had seized in the October raid. And, since the October 
raid, 19 club members had died and more were slowly dying.

Some were willing to do so in public. On June 5, they began to fast, hold 
demonstrations and conduct prayer services and vigils in the parking lot of 
the Cannabis Resource Center, at the corner of Gardner Street and Santa 
Monica Boulevard. Advocates for the use of medical marijuana hung a banner 
on the center that read, "Shame on George Bush for the Los Angeles Cannabis 
Resource Center's D.E.A.th."

The hunger strikers demanded that the feds cease the forfeiture action, 
relent from prosecuting any of the center's employees and return all 
property, confidential medical files and research data to the center. With 
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft cracking down on cannabis clubs all 
over the country, particularly in California, the strikers also demanded 
congressional hearings to address the federal government's efforts to 
squelch a movement that has led to legalized marijuana use for medical 
purposes in nine states.

The hunger strikers gave speeches and held rallies through the weekend, for 
five days, growing weaker by the day.

"I can vomit to death at home, alone, in silence, or stand with my friends 
for patients who will come after us," said Roger Moore, an AIDS patient, on 
June 7. "It is not a difficult choice to make." Pedro Jimenez, another AIDS 
sufferer, stood next to a box full of pills and said that he takes 35 
medications a day and injections to numb the painful tingling sensation 
that shoots down his arms and legs as a result of a condition called 
neuropathy.

The marijuana both alleviates side effects from the medications and 
provides relief from his neuropathy, Jimenez said.

"Some days, it feels like razor blades are cutting into my skin," Jimenez 
said, squinting into the afternoon sun. "Then, there's the diarrhea and 
vomiting from AIDS medications."

Numerous local and state officials turned out to support the hunger 
strikers, including state Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, and 
guest hunger striker Scott Svonkin, chief of staff for Assemblyman Paul 
Koretz, D-Los Angeles.

U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, wrote a scathing letter to the U.S. 
Department of Justice on June 6.

"This action makes absolutely no sense. It reflects the moral and 
ideological views of zealots in the [Justice Department], instead of a 
rational and clear-eyed evaluation of our most pressing national 
priorities," Waxman wrote.

On June 9, drained of almost all energy from five days of nothing but 
water, Gatorade and fruit juice, Imler and the hunger strikers decided to 
break the fast. They felt like they had demonstrated their commitment to 
the cause, but more important, they realized the time had come to start 
saving their strength for what figured to be a long fight ahead. "If we 
kill ourselves, we're just doing what the feds want us to do, and that's go 
away," Imler said to the protesters who had gathered that Sunday afternoon.

Medical marijuana users -- mostly people with life-threatening conditions 
- -- have reached a point of no return, Imler said, a showdown between the 
sovereignty of the state of California to regulate the health of its 
citizens and the authority of the federal government to regulate controlled 
substances.

Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, was passed by California voters 
in 1996. It protects medical patients who use marijuana from state 
prosecution if a licensed physician prescribes it. Yet the U.S. Supreme 
Court, in 2001, upheld Ashcroft's authority to shut down cannabis clubs on 
the basis that the federal Controlled Substances Act, which prohibits 
distribution of marijuana, provides no exception for medical necessity. 
U.S. v. Oakland Cannabis Buyer's Cooperative, 00151 (May 14, 2001).

Rather than definitively resolving a clash between state and federal law, 
however, the justices left open a number of statutory and constitutional 
issues and remanded the case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Meantime, other cases in the federal appeals system have raised significant 
constitutional issues that likely will head back to the high court, legal 
experts say.

The most basic issue to be resolved begins with the First Amendment, 
according to proponents of medical marijuana. In their minds, as medical 
patients, they are just exercising their constitutional right to associate 
freely in their cultivation and use of a drug that enables them to keep 
down the mess of pills they must swallow each day. If smoking a joint or 
two a day stimulates their appetite when they are undergoing chemotherapy 
or wasting away from AIDS, they say, then consider it an exercise of their 
due process right to be free from suffering and prolong life in a humane way.

And, advocates of compassionate use ask, just what is the federal 
government doing sticking its nose in the state's regulation of medical 
marijuana anyway?

It seems to them that the principles of federalism apply squarely to 
medical marijuana as an issue of health care and public safety. The case 
against the Cannabis Resource Center could raise any or all of these 
issues, experts say.

Federal law enforcers don't see any merit to these arguments. Mere mention 
of "medical cannabis" prompted a DEA agent based in Los Angeles to say 
recently, "There is no such thing as medical cannabis. It's called 
marijuana, and it is a Schedule 1 narcotic classified by Congress as an 
illegal substance with no currently accepted medical use." Tens of 
thousands of medical marijuana users and the California Medical Association 
say the medical benefits are obvious, however. To the users, federal 
enforcement actions targeting cannabis clubs are a heavy-handed exercise of 
power by President Bush and Ashcroft that show the less compassionate side 
of the conservative administration. "This is like an organizational death 
penalty," Imler said of the federal forfeiture action, his voice cracking 
slightly as he turned from the podium after calling off the hunger strike 
June 9. "I don't know why we have to go through this. We are not criminals."

It is two months later, mid-August, and Imler, 44, a former special 
education teacher from Santa Cruz, is sitting in his office at the Cannabis 
Resource Center, which has been reduced to a telephone and a mailing list, 
unless somehow he defeats the forfeiture action. He says he has gained a 
little weight recently, but he remains rail-thin, an imposing figure at 6 
feet 4 inches tall. Imler joined the medical marijuana movement after 
sustaining a head injury in a ski accident in marijuana activist Dennis 
Peron and attorney William Panzer.

It began as a buyer's club, he says, which supplied medical users with a 
daily menu of pot, sometimes having to acquire it on the black market. But 
he and his co-founders knew from the start that the risk of being shut down 
was high. They wanted their club to be above scrutiny, particularly from 
detractors who feared the influx of other drugs or infiltration by street 
dealers.

So Imler consulted with lawyers, West Hollywood officials and former Los 
Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block, who supported the cannabis club. 
Richard Odenthal, the former captain of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's 
Department in West Hollywood and the director of public safety for the city 
says, "We told them, as long as their operation was quiet, we were fine 
with it. In the four years I was working with the Cannabis Resource Center, 
we never had a single incident."

When he took office, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca supported the 
center but wanted it to remain free of any black market dealings, Odenthal 
says. To satisfy Baca's wishes, the center learned to grow its own plants, 
and with the help of the Osburns, it soon became totally self-sufficient.

Baca would not comment for this story. In 2000, after Imler and several 
founding members forked over a down payment of $150,000, the city of West 
Hollywood co-signed a bank loan that allowed the center to purchase for 
$1.2 million the building they had been leasing.

When the DEA shut it down last October, Imler says, the center had 10 
full-time employees and 24 volunteers. It had generated $1.2 million in 
revenue the previous year, which was put back into operating costs, 
inventory and employee salaries, he says.

The center's only requirement for membership had been a doctor's 
prescription, Imler says. After verifying that a prospective member had a 
valid prescription from a licensed physician, the center would invite 
applicants in for an "eye-to-eye" assessment, he says. The purpose of the 
assessment was to weed out potential drug addicts or troublemakers, he says.

"We'd explain the rules and make sure they weren't tweekers," Imler says. 
The center has a database with the names of 450 physicians who have 
prescribed marijuana for their patients, Imler says. It eventually grew to 
960 members, he says, and became a visible force in the community of West 
Hollywood as well as a nationally recognized clinic, turning away almost as 
many people as it accepted. "We didn't want to get too big and have a 
volume of pot that would drive us back into the black market," Imler says. 
"We rejected a lot of people." He laughs as he describes a live chat on The 
New York Times' online Drug Policy Forum, in which a participant 
characterized the center as "fastidious to the point of being persnickety."

"We developed a reputation as the strictest center in the country," he 
says, "which was to the dismay of many in the advocacy movement. They 
thought we were too engaged with law enforcement. They never trusted us. 
"Well, now they do."

At its peak, the center had access to a total of 1,000 plants, Imler says. 
"That's about one plant for each member," he says. "Lots of clubs operate 
with a bigger inventory than that."

Before the raid, he says, whenever the center ran out of marijuana, they 
would call the Osburns, who would drive down from Ventura with a fresh 
supply, usually about twice a month.

"The cost initially was $3,200 per pound, but eventually, we negotiated a 
reduced rate of $2,800 per pound based on the volume the members consumed," 
Imler says.

A single plant, depending on growing conditions, can yield between 8 ounces 
and a pound, he says.

"We went through about 5 pounds per week, for 960 people," he says. Members 
purchased the weed on a sliding scale, he says, because 30 percent were on 
insurance disability and couldn't afford to pay. Others made contributions 
as they drew pot from the system. The going rate was usually $50 for an 
eighth of an ounce, Imler says. Observers say that Imler and the center are 
squeaky clean and that criminal charges are unlikely.

"Federal prosecutors don't want to face a jury on this," one drug law 
expert says.

U.S. Attorney Deborah Yang of the Central District did not return calls for 
comment.

"They made sure they did everything right," says a lawyer familiar with the 
group who requested anonymity. "They were doing what they were told to do 
by the highest civilian law authorities in the state. They couldn't have 
done a better job of setting it up."

Unfortunately, other cases may reach the U.S. Supreme Court before his, 
Imler says. In his view, the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Center, with its 
solid reputation, is the best case to test a number of significant 
constitutional issues before the high court, he says.

In January 1998, undercover DEA agents posed as medical marijuana patients 
in a sting operation against the Oakland Cannabis Buyer's Cooperative.

Although the cooperative required the agents to show a doctor's 
prescription -- which turned out to be phony -- the feds busted the 
cooperative on the grounds that it violated the Controlled Substances Act, 
which prohibits distribution of drugs classified by Congress as Schedule 1 
narcotics.

The act classifies heroin, LSD and marijuana as Schedule 1 narcotics that 
have a high degree of potential for abuse, lack an accepted medical use and 
cannot be used for anything other than government-approved research. At 
trial, the cooperative argued that marijuana is the only drug that can 
alleviate severe pain and debilitating symptoms of patients who suffer from 
cancer, AIDS and other illnesses that require intense medication with 
numerous side effects and therefore is medically necessary for those patients.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer of the Northern District of California 
rejected the defense of medical necessity and ordered the club to cease 
supplying its members with marijuana.

After the cooperative continued distributing marijuana for medical 
purposes, the 9th Circuit ordered the District Court to modify its order by 
recognizing that medical necessity was a "legally cognizant defense." 
Because the case raised significant questions as to the ability of the 
federal government to enforce the nation's drug law, the U.S. Supreme Court 
took up the issue and ruled, on May 14, 2001, that medical necessity is no 
exception to the federal law.

Imler says that the center, not the Oakland Cannabis Buyer's Cooperative, 
would have been better off arguing the medical necessity argument to the 
Supreme Court because the center never got busted selling pot to undercover 
DEA agents. Their record was clean, he says. "That's baloney," says Santa 
Clara University Law professor Gerald Uelman, a drug law expert and one of 
the cooperative's lawyers. "The problem wasn't with the facts, it was with 
the U.S. Supreme Court." Having burned up the medical necessity defense, on 
remand to the 9th Circuit, Uelman says the cooperative intends to rely on a 
provision in the Controlled Substances Act that confers immunity on state 
law officers engaged in the enforcement of any law related to a controlled 
substance. Because the cooperative had the Oakland City Council and local 
law enforcers behind it, he says, and because it was operating in 
compliance with state law, the cooperative should be immune from 
prosecution under federal law as state agents.

The cooperative has a number of other arguments it intends to raise, Uelman 
says.

Some of the arguments are the same ones that Imler's lawyers will be trying 
in federal District Court, Imler says. He is frustrated by the possibility 
that higher courts may rule on these issues before his case gets the chance 
to make new law.

"There are a number of constitutional issues that have never been addressed 
by the Supreme Court or the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals," Robert Raich, 
Uelman's co-counsel and the attorney who argued for the Oakland cooperative 
before the high court in 2001, says. Raich, an Oakland attorney, points to 
constitutional issues related to the Due Process Clause, the Commerce 
Clause and the 10th Amendment, which leaves to the states all powers not 
reserved by the federal government.

"Under the Due Process Clause, you have the sanctity of the 
physician-patient relationship and the right to be free from pain, to 
prolong life and to ameliorate suffering," Raich says. "Then, under the 
Commerce Clause, the federal government cannot regulate anything that is 
not interstate commerce. Medical cannabis is not commerce, but even if it 
is, it is sold intrastate.

"And then, under our system of dual sovereignty, there's the state's right 
to regulate health care. And the voters of California have indicated that 
they want patients to have access to cannabis for medical purposes." 
Because the 9th Circuit could rule on issues of law that Imler and the 
Cannabis Resource Center could be raising in U.S. District Court, legal 
experts see the center's case as problematic for federal prosecutors and 
for Real. "This is an unusual case," one expert says. "It's unique in a 
meaningful way. This is a case that could come back to haunt the [District 
Court]. The facts are like a professor drew them to bring this thing to a 
clash on constitutional grounds.

"But there may be alternative remedies rather than a head-on clash over 
state-federal law."

The possibility of alternative remedies arises from the Supreme Court 
opinion in Oakland Cannabis Buyer's Cooperative, Uelman says. In that case, 
the high court ruled that the only exception to the Controlled Substances 
Act is for clinical trials by a federally approved medical research body.

Imler says the center would gladly apply to become a subject for medical 
research related to marijuana use and life-threatening illnesses. "We'd be 
happy to participate in federally approved research," Imler says. "Let the 
academics come in and crunch data. We've proven that we can keep complete 
records for the last five years. I can account for every flake of pot that 
has come through this place." Until such a day comes, however, Imler and 
his fellow members of the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Center are walking 
a fine line between state and federal law while trying to keep down their 
food or keep from seizing up in public.

Once in a while, a member stops by to see how the case is progressing, 
Imler says.

"I saw Pedro [Jimenez] the other day, he's still hanging in there," Imler says.

Jimenez has been HIV-positive since 1986 and has AIDS. One time, after he 
could not hold down solid food for 44 days, the disease began to attack his 
gall bladder, and he almost died, he said. "The side effects from the drugs 
are so fierce that I need cannabis as much as I need the other 
medications," Jimenez says. "People see these new drugs for HIV on the 
glossy pages of magazines and think we can climb a hill.

"Maybe in a wheelchair."
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