Pubdate: Wed, 20 Jul 2005
Source: Anderson Valley Advertiser (CA)
Column: Cannabinotes
Copyright: 2005 Anderson Valley Advertiser
Contact:  http://www.theava.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2667
Author: Fred Gardner
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?115 (Cannabis - California)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)

THE "PROFESSIONAL BUST" OF FRED DEMCHUK

It was one of those stories that makes  a big splash in the local media and 
then disappears. A warehouse in Hunters Point had been raided by the DEA in 
late March, "a  sophisticated marijuana cultivation site" dismantled, more 
than 400 plants seized.

There was no follow-up story because nobody ever got charged.

The man who had leased the warehouse  and was indeed growing marijuana 
there -Fred Demchuk-showed  me around the denuded interior about a week 
after the bust and  described what had gone down. Reporting the story could 
only  go against his interests, I figured, so I didn't.

I'd first met Fred in '96 at  Prop 215 campaign headquarters (Dennis 
Peron's fabulous club  on Market Street). Fred was from Detroit, 
originally; a semi-retired engineer with a blue-collar air. We both used to 
come by around 5 p.m. on Fridays  to hear Mike Mack play the piano and 
enjoy the end-of-the-work-week vibes.

In recent years Fred and Mike were involved in a patients' union whose 
members are mostly low-income folks. The founders  had given thought to 
launching a dispensary but lacked the necessary capital.

Their Plan B was to rely on competent Fred Demchuk and  other volunteers to 
grow or otherwise obtain cannabis for union members at the lowest possible 
price.

Fred leased the small warehouse  in April 2001. He cleaned and painted, 
then hired an experienced  indoor grower to install lights, ballasts, an 
irrigation system,  etc., and to oversee production. Fred handled security 
himself by moving into a small trailer outside the warehouse.

On week-ends  he'd visit his wife and family in San Jose.

In due course Fred and the  grower had a falling out. Allegations of theft 
were made, but  not to the police.

The grower departed and Fred took over the operation.

He had never grown indoors (and only once outdoors,  in 1976, on a very 
small scale) but he'd been looking over the grower's shoulder and learned 
about pH and what goes into the  nutrient solution. "He was doing things 
wrong," Fred  said in retrospect. "I took over in the midst of a dying crop 
and somehow turned it around.

We've been able to sell everything that we grow. Everything. Everything we 
grew was sticky. Even  the cops, when they were taking the stuff out, said 
man this stuff is really sticky." You know how growers talk... "They  were 
beautiful.

It broke my heart to see 'em go... Some were ready to harvest, some were 
three weeks into bloom.. We used  two lights per table.

That was our secret of success: photosynthesis you couldn't believe!

This whole room was up to here, almost ready to be harvested..."

The confiscated crop was the one the union was counting on to repay their 
loans and come out ahead for once. "We've never been able to make a profit 
at this place," according Fred. "It costs $3500 a month to rent and another 
$2000 at least for the electricity."  Fred expected to get one ounce per 
plant -a pound to a pound and a half per table.

There were 12 tables. He was growing on a 90-day cycle -a month of 
vegetative growth followed by two months of blooming. "We'd run out of 
money at the end of  the cycle," said Fred. "It might be a month before we 
could afford to buy clones again."

The buds were dried and sold  to union members for $200/ounce at 
twice-monthly meetings called  "jubilees." Fred described the members as 
"basically people who can't afford $400 at a club. I can honestly say we 
provided it at cost because we didn't make a friggin' dime. If I had I 
wouldn't be living in a trailer and I wouldn't have 240,000 miles on the 
car I'm driving.

This is a break-even operation."

The raiders had taken lights  and ballasts (34 each at $300/pair = $90,000 
worth of equipment, according to Fred, although the union's actual outlay 
had been much lower because some of the gear had been donated). Left behind 
were the 12 tables, each containing 25 one-gallon pots with cleanly 
lopped-off stumps about four inches high. Each plant had received water and 
nutrients via thin black tubing from sprinkler heads coming off a 2-inch 
riser from a 1-inch PVC pipe that connected to a bigger plastic skeleton. 
The growing medium in the pots was rock wool. Netting strung above the 
table had supported buds that, at the time of the raid, had  been forming 
for three weeks. "Some people use a spring  attached to a device up here to 
hold the branch up," said  Fred. "Trellis works just as well... We had a 
system where you could irrigate all the plants from one pump. They didn't 
take the pumps."

Busted along with Fred was  a 31-year old Navy vet disabled by severe 
migraines. Fred estimated the raiding party at "twenty or more -state, 
county, there  must have been four or five agencies-led by four DEA agents. 
They came in with guns drawn, but they didn't put them to our heads or 
throw us to the floor.

They handcuffed us but they didn't curse at us. They were professionals. In 
fact, I give them an outstanding. I've done enough of these operations 
myself in the military to know that when you go through the door you've 
got  to have absolute fire control because somebody could pull off a stray 
round and hit a friendly or hit a civilian.

Two: you've  got to have flawless intelligence going in. And number 
three,  execution has to be flawless as well. When you come in and take 
somebody down you don't have to shout at them, you don't have to push them 
to the ground.

A gun in the face is plenty, believe  me. They didn't even do that, they 
were professional enough to  lower them."

Fred said the turning point came quickly. "They asked me if I had a weapon 
on the site and I said, 'Oh yes, I do, I have my navy officer's dress 
sword.'" From the time they saw the sword, Fred said, "the officers treated 
us even less unfriendly." The sword had been awarded to him at Annapolis 
for excellence in engineering.  He got it out, inspected the blade, twirled 
it snappily, and  sheathed it.

Fred entered the Navy in 1956 as an enlisted man, then aspired to become an 
officer. Rep. John Conyers backed him and in 1957 he entered the Naval 
Academy.  Because he read, spoke, and wrote Russian (as the son of Ukranian 
immigrants) and already had experience in submarines, Fred "got asked to 
participate in some special activities,"  and didn't graduate with the 
class of '61. He retired in 1972.  "All my friends and all my operations 
have been with submarines  and SEALs," he says. "Matter of fact, one of my 
best friends, George Worthington, is head of worldwide operations for the 
SEALs."

Fred said he'd recently called  Worthington seeking "help for one of our 
brethren who'd  got in trouble with his CO -a SEAL. But George didn't want 
me to get involved with it and I said 'okay.'" Fred said he  knew several 
other admirals and politically powerful men from  his Navy days. "John 
McCain and Jack Poindexter were in  the class of '58, and I got to know 
them by accident.

Stepping  on their shoes.

I had to polish McCain's shoes for three weeks  and Poindexter's for a month.

Never thought I would ever hear from those two guys again, to be honest 
with you. I've got Poindexter's signature somewhere -they put me on report 
and it's his signature  on the report."

Fred resumed his favorable  review of his own bust. "In a military take 
down I don't  even ask for them to open the door. I just give the order 
'Open fire' and we just hit this place with guns that can shoot 6,000 
rounds a minute.

Fuel-air grenades that when they go off they kill everybody in the building.

And then we follow that up with some stun grenades and thermite grenades 
and make it really hot  inside in case someone did survive.

And then we come in.

"A paramilitary takedown is one step down, without all that ordnance but 
still pushing people down when they catch 'em and putting  guns to their 
head. A paramilitary bust leaves you with the feeling  that you've just 
been assaulted by storm troopers and everyone's pissed off, including the 
media.

"When it's a professional  bust, the only thing you get pissed off about is 
that they took  your weed. I'm pissed off that we don't have any medicine 
to provide to over 100 people.

I'm not pissed off at the DEA officers.  In fact, it's a pleasure to watch 
professionals in action.

They  had some kind of cutters, several boxes of tools in plastic 
carryalls,  and investigation kits, fingerprinting kits. They 
fingerprinted  the place and maybe even left audio devices and video 
devices  behind." Fred said the DEA agents "got chairs for  us to sit down 
in. They loosened my handcuffs when they realized I had arthritis -and it 
was terrible because I couldn't medicate. They let us go to the bathroom.

They didn't browbeat us or attempt to shout at us and make disparaging 
remarks.  One of them asked me if I'd done any intelligence work and I told 
him yes, I'd worked with Admiral Worthington and so forth.

He asked me my rank and I told him that was classified. He said he'd never 
heard of a classified rank and I said that under the  new anti-terrorist 
rules you're not allowed to reveal it.

"They attempted to find out how much business we were doing here. They came 
in with the impression that this was a big moneymaking operation.

They didn't realize the problems we had with crops.

They didn't realize that growing in rock wool is very demanding, you make 
one mistake  and you lose a crop... The cost of hydroponic nutrients is 
quite  high. The really good ones are from Canada, and because of 
the  trade imbalance, the cost is going up... We had a problem with  mites 
that almost destroyed an entire crop. I mean, at first we just stood there 
and watched the little bastards at work. But we got smart about it. Between 
each crop we had sufficient  time here to bomb the room but not the crop 
with insecticide  bomb, a special cytotoxin that kills them. You don't see 
them  for months.

You don't want to use it when the plants are in bloom...

"We've had problems and  overcome them. We've learned so much, this crop 
would have been  the pinnacle of our expertise.

We were finally at the point where  we're producing a reasonable crop. I 
pointed out to these officers that really what they were taking away was 
medicine for Iraqi war veterans, Vietnam War veterans, and disabled people.

I said,  'you know, you don't realize what harm you're doing.'

"The agent in charge we'll call Hughes. He pointed out that while we 
legitimate patients  might constitute three percent, the total market out 
there was 97 percent people who were abusing it. I said, 'Well go 
after  the 97 percent.' Fred laughed at his own opportunism, said he didn't 
tell Hughes that the numbers seemed like the reverse of reality -97 percent 
of cannabis users have valid medical reasons. "Hughes said there was 
nothing under federal law that legitimized medicinal marijuana and he 
advised people to use Marinol. I laughed and Eric [the other man being 
detained] gave him the scientific reasons." The DEA agents  seemed "vastly 
uninformed with respect to medicinal cannabis,"  said Fred.

There are 11 Vietnam and Persian Gulf vets in Fred's union.

He had been trying to organize a support group for Iraq war vets who needed 
more help than the VA could provide, and said he'd been in touch with eight 
men who were  interested. "Veterans have been through the gamut of 
having  been subjected to almost every medication out there.

Cannabis  does the job so much more efficiently with less problems, 
societal effects, nausea, vomiting and so forth.

But I do not think the  DEA agents are cognizant of that." Fred said the 
agent's line about three percent of patients being legitimate seemed like 
disinformation he'd picked up at a training.

"At some point they realized  that we only had two thousand dollars in cash 
and it was for  our PG&E bill so they gave it back. I believe Agent Hughes 
surmised that this actually was a legitimate medical grow. If this guy was 
wearing an Italian suit he could be on the cover of Gentleman's Quarterly, 
he was that good looking.

I realized he had his thing to do, to uphold the laws he's been sworn to 
uphold.

And I had my thing to do, I got my veterans to take care of, my disabled 
people to take care of. Where can we find some middle ground?

He said he wanted names of meth labs. I said,  'If I knew of a meth lab, it 
would be on your desk in a heartbeat.'  He said, 'Good for you.' So he 
knows right off the bat that we have no use for meth labs, we have no use 
for pill pushers of the type that profiteer, and we have no use for the 
street-drug people that have profaned the name of medicinal cannabis.

"He asked me if I'd help  them penetrate the Compassionate Caregivers club. 
They wanted  to know where the money was going.

I said basically all I know about it is there's some people who are pissed 
off at them occasionally, but I hadn't had any problems with them. They 
wanted to know who was pissed off enough to give them more information. I 
couldn't  come up with anybody."

Fred acknowledged having sold  part of his crop to a dispensary when the 
union had fewer members. "When we did sell at one time to the clubs, our 
stuff was always 5-star. Part of our secret  was hormones and catalytic 
boosters to increase the uptake of nutrients.

The plant will continue to produce resins and oils  continuously, all 
you've got to do is feed it. In rock wool you can get away with that. In 
soil you reach a saturation point but in rock wool it's continuous drainage.

So you can continue to feed that plant and it will grow and achieve 
medicinal grade.

"The DEA said they were  going to assay what they took from us for THC. So 
I'm gonna find  out. They got some that's three weeks into bloom and some 
that was fully.

I'm sure it was up to 12%. I'm going to ask them to  give me that figure.

Of course, if they give me an indictment  they will, it'll be in there...

"Hughes said he doesn't  want to see any kids using cannabis.

He has a baby and he doesn't  want his baby to grow up to use drugs.

I said, 'Look Hughes, you and I are in that ballpark.

I don't believe that cannabis should be legalized.

I think that medical cannabis should be legalized  and administered so that 
kids don't get it. I don't think a kid can perform at 100% efficiency after 
he's been out smoking dope or using alcohol.

It's just a physical impossibility. I want  to keep it out of the hands of 
children because it's a medicine.  It is not a recreational drug... You 
have to get to the point in life where you can understand what its use is 
and how it affects  you. Without that basic perception and understanding 
- -what we  call the age of accountability in the Mormon church-you 
should  not be using cannabis."

A Ukranian mormon?

"In the old country some  of my family were Jews who changed over to 
Catholicism and Ukrainian Baptist. I grew up on both sides.

When I decided to sober up  -to clean up my act with alcohol- a friend of 
mine talked to me about the Mormon church.

I realized that my family had been stunted because of my alcoholism. There 
had to be something out there that would give us an anchor and some hope 
and allow us  to restart in another direction. And I was glad there was 
because  right off the bat there was a class at the church about benching 
children -time-outs-instead of beating them. I had been raised  in a family 
where you beat children... Instead of Sunday school they had a course 
taught by this psychologist. It paid off because as soon as we started 
doing that instead of spanking them -'You  sit down until you're ready to 
talk to me about why you're misbehaving,' and they couldn't leave that 
chair, they couldn't play, they  couldn't watch TV- the results were amazing.

"When I married my wife  she had three children and then we had three more 
children. And  they all hated me. I was an alcoholic who used the military 
tactics that I'd been taught all my life to raise a family.

It doesn't work, that 'my way or the highway' type of thing.

With no middle  ground, children rebel.

I was able to salvage good relations  with three out of six. Thank God 
we're all today on speaking  terms.

"Once I started sobering  up and they saw a different side of me they began 
to realize  there was some hope for the old bastard.

I had my last drink in 1979 and I've been sober ever since.

I'm still active in  AA today.

I have a lot of people I sponsor." Fred said he wished there were more 
cannabis-friendly meetings. "AA tries to separate  the two. I told my 
sponsors that there was only one way I could have gotten sober without 
killing somebody.

Coming back from  the military situations that I was in there was a lot of 
built-up anger and wrath inside of me and I took it out on my family.  I 
finally was able to get one year of sobriety and then two. It took me three 
years after I joined the Mormon church.

But nobody ever came up to me and said quit drinking or quit that damn 
cigarette smoking. It took me a long time to get rid of those addictions.

"I started using cannabis in 1976 when I quit drinking.

By the grace of God, I was a block  away from a place called Bob's 
Rent-a-Garden in San Jose. He was a cannabis user himself and in the back 
of his rent-a-garden I grew cannabis for myself and we smoked three or four 
joints  a day and I was able to come down from alcohol without 
killing  anybody or harming my family or harming myself.

It was just like  landing with what they call a 100-foot canopy parachute.

You land so soft you don't even know you landed. And I was able  at that 
time also to go to AA meetings.

Cannabis is what kept me from going back to alcohol.

No question about.

I was able  to level out. And I was going to church as well. I really 
wanted  to change my life. I realized that I was in a spiral.

I just wanted to change my life. You come to a point where you realize that 
something's got to change and it's got to be you. Nobody's  going to change 
around you to make room for you. My wife gave  me an ultimatum: straighten 
out or fly out, so I had no choice.

"Once I straightened out  I was able to get jobs and get back on my feet 
and resurrect  my life. My last civilian job was as a stockbroker with 
Morgan Stanley. I was trained in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. 
I was supposed to go back and work on the 44th floor  of the South Tower. I 
have strong feelings about it because  I knew people who were in the tower 
at the time. My son-in-law  had just received a job offer to work in the 
North Tower. He was supposed to come in that day but the lady who hired him 
said 'Don't bother' because she wouldn't be in till Wednesday.

"That weekend was our Naval Academy 40th anniversary celebration. I was 
supposed to go. A friend of mine had booked a block of seats and there was 
an extra seat coming back, so I bought a one-way ticket on Jet Blue to go 
there and then I'd have a free seat  on the way back. At the last minute 
something came up and I canceled.

I would have been coming back on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. 
That was the third time in my life that I'd cheated death that way..."

What happens  next?

The DEA gave Fred reason to  hope that no indictment will come down. "One 
of the things  they told me was, 'You want to save yourself some money, 
don't bother getting an attorney because this is going to go away.'  I 
don't think they want to arrest a guy with an honorable discharge  who's 
going to bring in some admirals as character witnesses.  I told them, I 
fought for this country and I bled for this country.  I spent 93 days in 
Bethesda Navy Hospital. They put me back together  so they could send me 
back into submarines. That's how desperate they were for people.

They may have had manpower but not enough  skilled manpower, and there's a 
difference...

"I said I'd be willing  to help them with anybody who's a crook in this 
business but  I'm not going to turn in a fellow veteran.

There are some thieves in this business  and they'll get taken down sooner 
or later.

But most of the people  in the medical cannabis movement are pretty much 
straight arrows  and honest.

There's a few crooks.

I know 'em, I've met 'em, I've  been on the losing end a few times.

But they're few and far between and that's why it's a good movement to be 
in as far as I'm concerned.  To be able to be of service to other people.

That's where I've  derived most of my satisfaction over the last few years. 
Seeing  people all of a sudden be happy.

Seeing people who when they  walked in the door were pissed off, angry 
about the world, sit  down and socialize with you and their attitude 
changes completely. I also see it with the people coming back from Iraq. I 
didn't  get into this too much with Agent Hughes because I didn't want  to 
give him names but there's a lot of people who come back from  the Iraqi 
war who are really bitter.

Some of these people will  never get the psychiatric help that they really 
need. The rules are that you get 90 days of psychiatric help and if you 
qualify  for longer you have to show reason.

The point is, without some  sort of support group other than the VA system 
these people are  gonna be handled the same way we handled the Vietnam 
veterans and we're going to have another horde of homeless people out  on 
the streets."

Veterans hook up with Fred  through mutual friends, word of mouth, the AA 
grapevine. "They  go to the VA and they run into someone who knows me. Or 
they run into Paul at the Divisadero club, he's a Vietnam veteran.  Word of 
mouth is how I like it. The veterans have been prescribed drugs like 
morphine sulfate, Vicodin. Our first grower was a  perfect example.

He was misdiagnosed by the VA. They fed him  a whole bunch of drugs that 
damn near destroyed his pancreas.  Then they discovered that he really had 
pancreatitis all along!  They told him well, you've got so many years to 
live, and they gave him a bunch of new drugs.

With pancreatitis one of the symptoms  is severe back pain. He treated that 
with Vicodin, when that ran out he tried to get Oxycontin on the street.

Cannabis wasn't  strong enough for him. As a consequence he became more and 
more  strung out on these other drugs and it affected his personality.  One 
day after we'd raised some financial questions he just walked  out, left us 
with a dying crop. I was thumbing through the book real quick.

The thing to do with mites is just get rid of the  plant entirely and hope 
that it's only on that one plant. To get rid of them entirely, if you could 
afford it, you put in  huge air conditioners and grow your plants at about 
60 degrees.  At the same time you heat the nutrient solution.

That way you have what they call 'the feet is warm and the shoulders 
is  cold.' The mites can't take the cold. They head for Florida, man. So 
that was our plan. The feds were half-right when they called this 'a 
sophisticated operation.' But we had nowhere near  the money for a really 
sophisticated operation.

If we had, we  could have brought the price down to about 100 bucks.

And made enough to get by on."

The raid lasted about five hours, till 4 p.m. "The TV cameramen came, the 
sheriff's deputies, a woman from the DA's office, just like checking it 
out. 'What  should we do today?' 'Let's go to the bust...' The only 
agent  I had any trouble with," Fred said, "was one who kept trying to put 
words in my mouth.

Like he says, 'How long you been selling marijuana to the clubs?' I says, 
'The reason we're here is because we don't want to deal with the clubs.

We want to deal with the patients directly.

The clubs would only pay us a certain amount of dollars and the patients 
will pay us an equivalent amount.

But the clubs will mark that up and the patients  will have to pay it."

Fred said he had notified the landlord (who had undergone chemotherapy and 
was not entirely lacking in empathy). "We need a month to get out. I'm 
going to get a team of people in here and move stuff out and then we're 
going to have a going away party... We had just upgraded the 
electricity,  that's what pisses me off. We'd been blowing fuses all the 
time.  One of our friends is a master electrician and a good one. Now it's 
upgraded and we gotta leave"

When he drove home to San Jose  after the bust, Fred said, "My wife told 
me, 'I'm glad you're  out of the business.' My sister said the same thing. 
The tension had been so dramatic... My wife is a live-in babysitter for 
my  two grandsons, two wonderful boys. They just love grandma and  we love 
them. I get down to see grandma on the weekends and my  son-in-law and my 
daughter take off for Crescent City. Last night  the youngest got up at 9 
o'clock and headed for grandma's bedroom  just as I was heading for 
grandma's bedroom.

Well, guess who  got to sleep with grandma last night?" This boy is just 
beautiful.

He has the Russian features, steel blue gray eyes...  And so, these kids 
and my wife made me think: 'What am I doing? Where are my priorities?'

"It could be that this  is a blessing in disguise.

Not that I'm going to stop doing what  I was doing, but it can be done on a 
smaller scale.

Within reason. Like Agent Hughes said, 'This guy Larry's on my radar 
screen.'  I said 'How did I get on your radar screen?' He didn't 
answer  that question. I said 'I'm gonna stay off your radar screen.' I 
asked him, 'if I had grown less than a hundred plants would  you be here?' 
He went like this [makes a dismissive non-verbal  gesture with hand]. He 
didn't come out and say 'No, absolutely  not,' but...

Fred estimates the cost of  prosecuting him would be well over a quarter of 
a million dollars.  "For what?" he asks rhetorically. "'This guy's got zero 
assets, we're not gonna take his trailer.

His navy dress  sword?' Come on. The DEA is going to have to start 
diverting  their resources to some important stuff.

If they don't they're gonna catch hell from the citizens who are gonna wake 
up and say 'Wait a minute, you busted these legitimate cannabis guys  and 
these guys are walking around free making meth in my neighborhood?'

"Keeping medical cannabis illegal  costs too damn much. Society may not be 
that rational, but that's  our job, to explain that when you really boil it 
down, does it  make any sense to prosecute anybody who's growing for 
legitimate  patients?

We could have music programs back in our schools!" Fred related his 
thoughts about the bust in early April. On  June 18, according to Mike 
Mack, Fred was rear-ended by a big-rig  in San Jose and died in the 
hospital the next day.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom