Pubdate: Fri, 02 Mar 2007
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2007 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Kirk Johnson
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Marijuana - Medicinal)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)

KILLING HIGHLIGHTS RISK OF SELLING MARIJUANA, EVEN LEGALLY

DENVER -- Ken Gorman, an aging missionary of marijuana, was found 
murdered in his home here two weeks ago. The unsolved crime is 
exposing the tangled threads at the borderland of the legal and 
illegal drug worlds he inhabited.

Mr. Gorman, who was 60, legally provided marijuana to patients under 
Colorado's medical marijuana law, but he also openly preached the 
virtues of illegal use, and even ran for governor in the 1990s on a 
pro-drug platform.

In recent years, he had grown frightened as the mainstream medicine 
of cannabis care bumped against the unregulated and violent terrain 
of the illicit drug market. He had been robbed more than a dozen 
times in his home on Denver's west side, had recently gotten a gun 
and also talked of installing a steel door and gates.

"Ken was really fed up with the barrage of robberies and he told me 
it would never happen again," said Timothy Tipton, a friend and 
fellow medical marijuana supplier, who said Mr. Gorman showed him the 
gun about two months ago.

Some legal experts say Mr. Gorman's death could lead to a 
reconsideration of how medical marijuana is administered here and 
elsewhere. Providers are often left exposed and vulnerable because of 
the nation's conflicting drug laws, with marijuana use illegal under 
federal law but legalized for some medicinal purposes here and in 10 
other states.

Since 1997, after the first medical marijuana law was passed in 
California, as many as 20 legal marijuana providers have been killed 
around the country, mostly in robberies, said Allen St. Pierre, the 
executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of 
Marijuana Laws, or Norml, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington.

Some in law enforcement, including Colorado's attorney general, John 
W. Suthers, say the Gorman killing illuminates more clearly than ever 
that crime and marijuana cannot be disentangled.

"Mr. Gorman showed that the law is abused and can be abused," said 
Nate Strauch, a spokesman for Mr. Suthers.

Many people in the medical marijuana supply system say the central 
risk comes down to the fact that they work in the shadows, where law 
enforcement officials are often either conflicted or hostile and 
crime is rampant.

At the Colorado Compassion Club, for instance, which opened last year 
as a storefront support center in Denver, the 200 marijuana patients 
served there go through as much as a pound of marijuana a day. The 
club grows as much as it can, said its founder, Thomas E. Lawrence, 
but must rely on buys on the illicit market for the rest, usually 
made by one or two caregivers who have volunteered.

Mr. Gorman's killing, legal experts say, has exposed the paradoxes 
and ambiguities about medical marijuana that most states have failed 
to grapple with.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, which 
administers the marijuana program, is not authorized, for example, to 
provide information about where the 1,100 patients who are certified 
under the program can obtain their drugs, according to the 
department's Web site.

The state also does not license marijuana providers, or inspect the 
quality of the drug that patients obtain.

Colorado's law allows patients with certain illnesses, as well their 
doctors and others who provide care, the right to possess, grow and 
transport marijuana.

But all those things remain illegal under federal law. And a chief 
deputy district attorney for Denver, Greg Long, said that anyone 
selling drugs illegally, even if the final recipient was legally 
entitled to possess them, could still technically be violating state 
laws too -- though as a practical matter, Mr. Long said, prosecutors 
do not generally pursue cases in which the drug being sold is 
marijuana for certified medical use.

The portrait of Mr. Gorman is just as unclear. His friends say he was 
quixotic and selfless, a man uninterested in financial gain who 
tilted against the confining rules of society, especially the drug laws.

A merry prankster at a time when marijuana advocacy groups were 
becoming more adept at politics than protest, he had become an 
anachronism, acquaintances say, whose counterculture antics 
embarrassed and angered many people in the medical-advocacy and legal 
reform movements.

"I have gray hair on my head and I attribute some of it to Ken 
Gorman," Mr. St. Pierre of Norml said.

Some critics said Mr. Gorman was caught up in his own image as a 
rebel, thwarting even the rules about medical marijuana that could 
further the causes he espoused.

Just one week before his death, for example, the local CBS television 
news affiliate in Denver broadcast an investigative story in which a 
young station employee with a hidden camera captured Mr. Gorman 
happily explaining how to fake the medical card that would make a 
drug transaction appear legitimate.

The story prompted an uproar in medical marijuana circles, forcing 
Mr. Gorman to defend himself on a pro-marijuana Internet forum from 
attacks by people who said he had betrayed them by making medical 
marijuana look like a cover for old-fashioned drug-dealing.

And he had become an angry, fearful man, his friends and 
acquaintances said. Though he had served time in prison -- five years 
for a felony drug conviction in the mid-1990s -- and often seemed to 
scoff at the law, he had grown increasingly frustrated about being a 
crime victim himself.

The Denver police have revealed little about the murder investigation.

A spokesman, Sonny Jackson, said the police responded to reports of 
shots fired at Mr. Gorman's home around 7 p.m. on Feb. 17 and found 
Mr. Gorman with a gunshot wound to the chest. He died shortly thereafter.

Mr. Jackson said that there had been an incident the previous night 
in Mr. Gorman's home; someone had been arrested and neighbors 
reported shots fired. But investigators said they did not believe 
that incident and the slaying were connected.

Colorado's medical marijuana law, enshrined in the state's 
Constitution by a statewide vote in 2000, protects people from 
prosecution under state law. Acquiring the drug illegally, however, 
puts those people in very dangerous company.

Mr. Gorman, his friends say, had no intermediary. The face that was 
famous on television as Colorado's most ebullient marijuana advocate 
was the same one making the buys out on the market.

"It's dangerous to help people," said Mr. Tipton, who lives in a 
suburb of Denver and said he had about 45 marijuana patients. "We're 
out there, exposed to abuse from patients, law enforcement, robberies 
- -- it's a long list."

Lawyers and medical marijuana advocates in California -- which has 
the oldest and by far largest medical marijuana system in the nation, 
with about 100,000 licensed drug recipients and 200 dispensaries -- 
say that robberies and violence against medical distributors, a 
problem in the earlier days of the system, have become much less 
frequent because of improved security.

But many robberies also often go unreported, said Dale Gieringer, the 
state coordinator for the California chapter of Norml.

"It usually gets hushed up," Mr. Gieringer said.

Mr. Gorman's home, still taped off by a police ribbon, has become a 
kind of shrine to the subculture he celebrated.

On one night a few days after the killing, a group of more than 20 
people -- young men and teenagers, mostly -- sat around a bonfire in 
Mr. Gorman's front yard, passing marijuana joints and beer bottles as 
a Tupac Shakur song blared on a car stereo.

"He was the most compassionate, kind man I knew," said a young man 
who identified himself as Vuddah, as thick curls of smoke shrouded 
the group. "We want to keep this place open so that the patients can 
keep coming," he added. "That's what we're going to do.

"That's what Ken would have wanted," he continued. "To us, he was a 
medical marijuana freedom fighter."

Dan Frosch contributed reporting. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake