Pubdate: October 1999 Source: Zenger's News Magazine (CA) Copyright: 1999 Zenger's News Magazine Contact: Zenger's, PO Box 50134, San Diego, CA 92165-0134 Author: Mark Gabrish Canaan Related: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99.n792.a06.html http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99/n799/a01.html DID S.D. POLICE KILL CHUCK HUNDLEY? Marijuana Activists Confront City, Each Other "I have a disease which is an incurable disease," medicinal marijuana user Chuck Hundley told the San Diego City Council July 27, three weeks after the Shelter from the Storm cannabis growing co-op was raided by city narcotics police and his plants were seized. "It has many symptoms, including lupus, arthritis and Renaud's phenomenon. There is no pharmaceutical company that produces a drug that can cure me when I have an attack. Look at my hand coloring. I get extremely swollen. My blood circulation nearly stops. Marijuana actually can, within five to 15 minutes, stop the rapid onset of an attack. It's a vascular dilator. It's the only thing that can cure an attack." Five weeks later, Chuck Hundley died and surviving members of Shelter from the Storm are blaming his death on the San Diego Police Department and its refusal to allow medicinal marijuana users to grow and use the substance in peace without harassment. Club member Barbara MacKenzie told Zenger' s that Hundley had already gone through the criminal justice system once before, and at his sentencing hearing "his lawyer recommended to him, right there in the courtroom ... that he go ahead and grow with us, because that would be... the safest and most legal" way he could obtain marijuana. MacKenzie and her co-founder of Shelter from the Storm, Steve McWilliams, are still looking for a way they can obtain marijuana and still be within the San Diego city and county authorities' narrow interpretation of Proposition 215, the landmark medical-marijuana initiative California voters passed in November 1996. After their eviction from the Hillcrest facility where the July 6 police raid took place, they settled in a new location in Kearny Mesa and, with a volunteer consultant, worked out a plan for what they called a "surrogate nursery" in which they would grow plants for clients. But there, too, they've run into landlord problems and even if they can find a permanent location, the local, state and federal political climate will continue to work against them. According to a letter they recently received from the office of San Diego police chief Dave Bejarano, city police followed the department's guidelines on Proposition 215 when they raided Shelter's Hillcrest location on July 6. ("That's news to us," MacKenzie told Zenger's. "For months they've been telling us they don't have any guidelines.") San Diego County District Attorney Paul Pfingst, who is still considering prosecuting McWilliams based on his July 6 arrest, has stated flatly that he doesn't consider a growing co-op to be legitimate under Proposition 215. The recommendations of the state task force convened by California Attorney General Bill Lockyer which, ironically, were issued just one day before McWilliams was arrested and his group's plants seized won't be implemented this year, partly because Governor Gray Davis threatened to veto the legislation containing them and partly because law-enforcement officials and medical-marijuana advocates didn't agree on whether patients should be allowed or required to register with the government as medicinal marijuana users to receive the substance legally. Above all, there rests the 900-pound gorilla of the federal government, which has consistently claimed that their laws making marijuana completely illegal for any purpose take precedence over Proposition 215 and the other six state medical-marijuana initiatives approved by voters in Arizona, Alaska, Hawai'i, Oregon, Washington and Colorado. One of the few pieces of good news recently received by California medical-marijuana advocates, however, was a September 13 ruling by a federal appeals court in San Francisco that partially overturned a judge's order closing down a medical-marijuana dispensary in Oakland. The appeals court told federal district judge Charles Breyer, who issued the injunction against the club, that he should consider granting the club the right to dispense marijuana to patients who would "suffer serious harm if they are denied cannabis [marijuana]." This would significantly narrow the number of patients for whom medical marijuana would be available, but it may be the best available outcome in the current political climate. It's also the route taken by Americans for Medical Rights, which sponsored six state medical-marijuana initiatives that made it to the ballot and passed in the 1998 election. Unlike Proposition 215, these initiatives limited access to patients suffering from one of five conditions: side effects from cancer chemotherapy, wasting syndrome from AIDS, epilepsy and other seizure disorders, multiple sclerosis and other spastic disorders, and glaucoma. It's not clear whether Chuck Hundley's unusual health problems would have fit under these criteria, but these stricter laws seem to be heading in the direction of the federal appeals court that carefully carved out a potential exception, for a handful of very sick people, to the U.S. government's total prohibition. Ironically, while marijuana distribution centers throughout the state have been forced to close down, the California Alternative Medicinal Center (CAMC) on Fourth Avenue in Hillcrest has continued to operate since its inception in 1997 even though it openly sells marijuana on premises, which McWilliams has been told is illegal. McWilliams and other members of his group have become increasingly jealous of the CAMC's ability to operate while his own organization has been shut down at least twice and has accused the city and CAMC of being in collusion to give CAMC a monopoly on medicinal marijuana distribution in San Diego. McWilliams and other Shelter from the Storm members took these allegations to the street last August 19, when they staged a demonstration outside CAMC headquarters. 'The main issue is that there is unequal protection under the law," MacKenzie told CAMC founder and president Carolyn Smith Konow during the protest. "If you're going to be here, then we should be allowed to do the same thing. We should be allowed not to have the police come in, raid us and destroy or patients' plants. That is totally unconscionable, and for the police to ignore or to sanction this place, and at the same time persecute patients [who grow their own], is a statement on San Diego that I don't want to see and I'm sure you don't want to see also." "There was a reason that the police came to see you, obviously, because they don't just come for no reason," Konow replied. "I don't have any idea. I wasn't at your organization. We've been working with the city, and they're very happy with what we're doing. I don't know what we're doing differently than we are." Konow, who served on Lockyer's statewide task force, said that one of its recommendations 'is that the local law enforcements have to use their own judgments. And that's what they've done in San Diego." - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake