California's Separate Peace

One year ago the state's citizens legalized the medical use of marijuana. Now they're showing the rest of the nation there's a way out of the war on drugs.

A Thousand Flowers Bloom

In November 1996, Californians committed drug-war treason. By a popular vote, they passed Proposition 215, which eliminated state penalties for the medical use of marijuana. Bill Clinton and three former presidents campaigned against this ballot initiative; former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop lambasted it. Presidentiat candidate Bob Dole likewise urged Californians to vote no, as did the governor and attorney general of California, a raft of medical associations and most of the state's cops.

The people rejected their advice. The law they passed - the Compassionate Use Act - defies a long-standing dictum of the war on drugs: that marijuana is a devil weed with no medical value. The initiative's deliberately vague wording did something equally radical. It snatched from the political and medical establishments the authority to set drug policy. Instead, marijuana protocol is being created by the same people who have been victimized by the drug war for three decades. They're discovering mutual interests and building muscular new coalitions. A fertile anarchy now rules the nation's largest state.

Proposition 215 didn't say a word about how to make medical marijuana work. It didn't specify who should get marijuana or how. Nor did it acknowledge that marijuana remains strictly forbidden under federal law - which trumps that of California leaving users vulnerable to arrest by federal agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration. Proposition 2.15 only said that California laws against marijuana possession and cultivation "shall not apply to a patient, or to a patient's primary caregiver, who possesses or cultivates marijuana ... upon the written or oral recommendation or approval of a physician." So now doctors, patients and activists are running every which way, forging pell-mell the greatest act of resistance ever to the modern war on drugs.

Read strictly, the Compassionate Use Act seems to imagine that patients will get marijuana one of two ways: by growing their own or by magic. The law grants nobody the right to sell or give away pot. But, latching onto the clause about "primary caregivers," a network of "buyers clubs" pot shops has spread throughout California, claiming authority to possess, grow and distribute marijuana as their members' primary caregivers. In January, a California state judge accepted this stretch of the definition temporarily.

In the meantime, buyers clubs flourish under Mao's famous maxim: Let a thousand flowers bloom. No two of the state's 17 clubs are run identically. Some are as stark as a welfare office, some resemble Starbucks, and others thump and reek like a freshmandormitory lounge circa 1969. Oakland's, for example, is a low-key not-for-profit dispensary. Patients show their IDs in the foyer of a downtown high-rise, take the elevator to a spare, fluorescent-lighted room and choose a little bud from a selection of half a dozen grades kept under glass. Then they pay the Cashier (Visa and Mastercard accepted) and leave. No smoking is allowed. "This is a place to get your medicine," says Jeff Jones crisply. Jones, the club's tightly wrapped 23-year-old director, believes that mimicking the practices of conventional pharmacies is crucial to medical marijuana's ultimate success.

Just across the bay, though, the San Francisco Cannabis Cultivators Club is a for-profit, multilevel happening where patients can hang out for hours, talking, snacking and sharing joints. "Part of the magic of this medicine is in the sharing of it," says Wayne Justman, the club's bouncer, who shoulders through the crowd exuding the peace he aims to keep. "We see no shame in being who we are."

Maybe not, but under federal law - maybe even under California law - the club is a five-story felony. (The DEA classifies marijuana, along with heroin, as a Schedule I drug, meaning it has no medical use and cannot even be studied. Possession of it can lead to mandatory minimum sentences.) All the clubs know they're vulnerable, so they try to appear - on paper at least - as workaday as the phone company; even San Francisco's wraps itself in the dull trappings of bureaucracy. Many have spent a couple of thousand dollars on a computer, a digital camera and a laser printer so that they can churn out impressive photo IDS for members. They issue wordy administrative forms for physicians to coplete, as though checking boxes and filling in blanks somehow negated the grim reality of federal law. The San Francisco club even issues Cultivator Contracts to pot growers in the canyon-slashed "emerald triangle" of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties, believing that these should indemnify both the gardener and any hapless courier driving the kilos down Highway 101. ("Forget it," says Humboldt County Sheriff Dennis Lewis. "Those contracts have no validity.")

But the contracts are an attempt to plug one of the many holes in the new law. The kilos of marijuana demanded by ailing Californians have not simply sprung from the forehead of Zeus. Even the mainstream Farm Bureau, which represents California's $20 billion agriculture industry, recognizes that California's pot growers raise what is often called the state's biggest cash crop.

The growers I met in Humboldt County dress like stoners, in T-shirts and Tevas, but they farm with a professional sobriety that would shame Archer Daniels Midland. One crew's members - whose names, of course, I can't reveal - gave me a lecture that ranged from marijuana's molecular structure to its international economics in the hour it took to drive and hack our way to their garden. "Biologically, marijuana wants to grow in an Iowa cornfield," says one 22-year-old as we clamber down a wooded hill so steep I bounce from tree to tree like a pinball. "We only have an advantage because we can hide." The "garden," I discover, is a dozen garbage bags full of potting soil and seedlings. When a police helicopter zooms too close, the whole farm - worth about $38,000 wholesale - can be moved in an hour on the backs of a dozen dedicated ecofreaks.

This summer, Humboldt's growers began asking their county supervisors to let them grow openly for the buyers clubs; they proposed that gardens growing "medicine" fly the Geneva (red) Cross flag. ("Hal" says Humboldt County Deputy District Attorney Worth Dikeman. "My interpretation is that the growers in the hills have no protection under 215, no matter what the supervisors say.") Three hundred miles south, in San Jose, the city fathers permit cultivation, but only on the premises of the local club.

Law enforcement generally condemned 215 during the campaign, but some cops have risen to the challenge of policing the tense border between recreational and medical marijuana. "You're looking at a guy who used to confiscate a car for a single marijuana seed," says Capt. Richard Odenthal of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, who works closely with the buyers club in West Hollywood to make sure everything runs smoothly. "Life's changed, and, overall, I think it's for the better. We're concentrating on things that are more important to society."

Some cops are downright creative. In the town of Arcata, in the heart of the emerald triangle, police chief Mel Brown issues ID cards bearing his signature to any patient who brings him a legitimate doctor's recommendation. "I don't want my officers wondering if this or that person really is a patient," he says. Other cops I spoke to can't seem to get beyond their age-old hostility to reefer. In the hot, flat northern reaches of the state's Central Valley, Proposition 215 might as well have never been passed. "it really hasn't changed how we do business at all," says Butte County Sheriff Mick Grey. "I happen to think 215 is a farce."

There's something refreshing about the organic, decentralized way that California is creating medical-marijuana procedure. It resembles a kind of land rush, with thousands of people thundering toward uncharted terrain, each trying to stake out a piece of turf and hoping it and they - will be there when the dust settles. No central figure hogs the spotlight or draws all the fire. Although big out-of-state money helped to get the measure passed, no corporation is yet trying to cash in or muscle policy. From Humboldt County to West Hollywood, the industry, as it were, seems dominated by hippies, potheads and - most of all - heartfelt activists, few if any of whom are getting rich.

The Cultural War

The war on drugs has always been about more than just drugs. The RAND Corp. estimated, in 1991, that the drug war generates more than $30 billion a year in public expenditures, a cash cow for everybody from the DEA to the $500 million-a-year urine-testing industry. (That year, the federal drug budget was $10.5 billion; in fiscal 1997, it will top $15 billion.) Under Bill Clinton, the war against pot smokers is bigger now than it was under Nixon, Reagan or Bush; state and local police made almost 600,000 marijuana arrests in 1995 - the highest number ever and 86 percent of them were for simple possession. An estimated one federal prisoner in six is doing time for a marijuana offense.

Marijuana is by far the most widely used illegal drug in America, so its strict prohibition is essential to maintaining the size of the drug war. Were pot prohibition to crumble, the number of regular users of illegal drugs would shrink from 13 million to 3 million, according to drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey's own figures. In other words, the country's "illegal drug problem" would shrink by 75 percent, and the public might expect - even demand - a commensurate reduction in drug-war spending.

But the war on drugs has a value beyond the dollars flowing to police departments, security firms and the billion-dollar private-prison industry. Drugs serve as a unifying enemy, the way communism once did. Marijuana was criminalized in the 1930s, to justify deporting Mexican "beet peons." Blacks on crack were blamed, in the 1980s, for every inner-city problem from murder to AIDS. Drugs "explain" ruined families and violent children, troubles whose deeper causes are too painful to ponder.

Just as the drug war depends on marijuana prohibition, marijuana prohibition in turn depends on the public believing the substance to be addictive, deadly, medically useless and a "gateway " to harder drugs. For all the talk of drug education, every president since Gerald Ford has worked hard to diminish people's understanding of drugs' pharmacology and to eliminate distinctions in the public mind between moreand less-dangerous drugs, between casual use and addiction. Under Ronald Reagan, the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse ordered a "purge" of all agency literature that made such distinctions. When the voters of the country's biggest state say that they no longer buy the official line, that they insist they can distinguish between a dying patient finding relief from nausea and a 15-year-old getting stoned for fun, that's a political earthquake.

It doesn't take long, when shuttling between the offices of the drug-war hawks and the buyers clubs, to realize that both camps are talking about things far bigget than whether a certain category of patient can have access to this or that medicine. "If the terminally ill want to smoke paint, I don't care," says James Copple of the Washington, D.C., Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, the biggest private opponent of medical marijuana. "What we're concerned about is the environment that leads a young person into smoking marijuana. It's a cultural symbol - what we are and aren't going to embrace."

The fight over medical marijuana is to a large degree the latest flare-up in a cultural war that's been going on since the '6os. A good illustration is the way both sides talk about Marinol, the prescription pill that delivers a concentrated dose of delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC - the stuff in marijuana that gets people stoned. Swallowing a tab of Marinot is like eating a pound of high-test pot brownies say patients who have taken it; 45 minutes later - long after some have forgotten they took it the drug comes on like a kick in the head. Whenever patients clamor for smokable reefer, the government offers Marinol. Consider the logic: Marijuana is evil because it gets you Stoned, and "there is not a shred of scientific evidence that marijuana is medically beneficial," says McCaffrey. But, hey, says the government to the sick, have a whopping dose of precisely the marijuana compound that gets you stoned. What the feds don'tseem to like is marijuana smoking and the cultural baggage that goes along with it.

Medical- marijuana activists mount a compelling case against Marinol, though their agenda is broader, too. One of marijuana's medical uses is to control the nausea attendant to cancer chemotherapy, so asking patients to swallow a pill and hold it down for 45 minutes is problematic. Also, marijuana smoke contains some 400 chemicals, and scientists aren't certain that THC is the one that has the desired medical effects, activists say. The activists want the plant. And they want it for reasons that go beyond its molecular properties.

Part of the attraction is the do-it-yourself aspect. Valerie Corral, 45, has been smoking marijuana for over 20 years to control her epilepsy but has never been able to afford to buy it. A longtime home-grower, she farms the stuff in her jungly aerie overlooking the Pacific Ocean, outside Santa Cruz, giving it free to other ailing patients in a co-op she started. Corral and her husband, Mike, got Proposition 215's drafters to insert the word "cultivation" into the clause allowing possession because, she says, growing one's own is not only safer but therapeutic as well. "People who are seriously ill often benefit from tending their own plant, tending their own medicine," she says, trimming spiky leaves of Cannabis sativa in the steamy plastic lean-to where she grows her plants. "We've given a plant to patients after providing them with essentially the same stuff to smoke, and they come back and tell us theirs is better."

Nobody is more devoted to smokable marijuana than Dennis Peron, the founder of the country's first pot dispensary, the San Francisco Cannabis Cultivators Club. Peron, 51, began dealing pot in 1970, soon after coming back ftorn Vietnam. In the late '8os, his lover Jonathan West contracted AIDS and found that marijuana helped ease the nausea and pain. After West died, in 1991, Peron turned political, devoting himself to getting medical marijuana legalized. He got a medical-marijuana bill passed in San Francisco, in 1991, and opened the country's first buyers club there four years before the passage of Proposition 215.

Peron maintains that the communal trimming of buds, the rolling of joints and the passing of roaches the sociophysical minutiae surrounding marijuana use - are themselves beneficial to many patients' health. "These people, some of them, live in a single room in the Tenderloin, with the bugs and the noise, just waiting to die," says Peron, a joint bobbing in the corner of his mouth. (The affliction he treats with marijuana is alcoholism.) "Outside these walls, they're scum. They have no job, no money, no life, and they have AIDS. Here, they see their friends, they get their medicine and share it; it's their sanctuary." He wades into the crowd trailing smoke, regally sniffing a sample from a new grower, advancing a little herb to a destitute patient who promises to pay next week.

Peron represents a wing of the medical-marijuana movement that, frankly, reveres the drug. "All use is medical," he is famous for saying (meaning that making oneself feel better by smoking pot, regardless of condition, is as legitimately "medical" as taking Prozac. This goes way beyond the moderate "harm reduction" philosophy held by most drug-law reformers, which holds that drugs will always be with us, and we should strive to limit their dangerous effects. Though he was shot by a narc in a pot raid, in 1977, Peron isn't even particularly interested in constitutional arguments about the drug war's violations of civil liberties. He speaks for a resilient subculture that believes the world would be a better place if more people got high.

High is a word most medical-marijuana activists never used to say. They talked only in terms of controlling nausea, of combating "wasting syndrome" - the catastrophic weight loss of AIDS or of reducing intraocular pressure in glaucoma patients. A rhetoric professor named Bob Randall launched the movement, in 1976, by fighting to become the country's first legal marijuana smoker. Talking to him as little as three years ago, you'd never know anyone smoked marijuana for fun. Nowadays, that's changing, and Peron isn't the only one to venture that getting stoned is psychologically beneficial to people coping with a grave illness.

Marcus Conant, a stately 61-year-old dermatologist who runs San Francisco's biggest private AIDSpractice, now includes the euphoric effect when he discusses marijuana's benefits with his patients. "Many people who smoke pot like to sit and talk to other people, and for AIDS patients who are withdrawn and wasting, that is a wonderful side effect," says Conant. "To have someone want to sit and eat and talk to their mom? What a wonderful thing!"

J. Tony Serra, the crusading defense lawyer on whose life the James Woods movie True Believer was based, recently revealed that he has smoked pot for 30 years to enable the "spherical" thinking necessary to cope with a "linear" legal system. Serra now gets legal pot for "stress." "Marijuana gives you that overview, that transcendental perspective," he told a lawyers newspaper, the San Francisco Daily Journal, in August. That such people are poking their heads above ground at all, after decades of drug-war hegemony, is a tribute to the power of medical marijuana to open up debate.

The Resistance: Gays and Doctors

Potheads and legalizers have been around for years without slowing down the drug war, let alone Winning a victory the size of Proposition 215. It remains to be seen whether medical marijuana wilt ebb here, a wacky West Coast fluke, or whether the win can be duplicated elsewhere. So it's worth asking: Why did the drug-war resistance triumph this time? Bill Zimmerman, who managed the campaign, is one reason. He isn't a pothead or a legalizer; he's a charismatic 55-year-old political professional who has been winning high-profile progressive campaigns for 20 years. That the medical-marijuana campaign could afford a gunslinger like Zimmerman is significant. "This time," he says, "the resistance had resources."

Drug warriors never tire of sneering at the big contributions that the pro Proposition 215 organization assembled. New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal, a longtime drug-war hawk, warned that the "gobs of money" raised by the Proposition 215 campaign would encourage "creeping legalization." Ronald Brooks of the California Narcotics Officers Association calls the referendum. a fraud. "I think the voters were duped in California," he says.

Which is what election losers always say. For the first time in living memory, the drug warriors faced real opposition - opposition that could raise bucks.

Medical marijuana has a powerful ally in the gay community. The two movements - medical marijuana and gay rights - have been entwined ever since AIDS victims learned that the drug could ease their suffering. Gays have been fighting a life-or-death struggle against the government and the pharmaceutical industry for going on to years, and they're good at it. "If there hadn't been political activism, we wouldn't today have the drugs that have reduced AIDS deaths by 19 percent," says Conant. "It took ACT-UP to force the government to come up with the funding for the research that led to the dramatic advances."

Ironically, it was the federal government's retreat from a medical-marijuana experiment that made California's initiative campaign inevitable. In 1991, President Bush killed a 15-year-old program under which Uncle Sam had grown marijuana in Mississippi for a handful of patients. Only those willing to jump through myriad legal and medical hoops had gotten pot: There were but 10 on the roster when AIDS sufferers began submitting a flood of applications. Rather than meet the need and dilute the message of the drug war, Bush shut down the program. Gay activists asked Clinton to revive it and were rebuffed. To be denied relief from AIDS symptoms felt to many gays like the same old hateful bullshit.

Medical marijuana gets political strength, too, from its resonance with trends toward alternative medicine, herbalism, spirituality, hospices and assisted suicide. This assures some sympathy from a huge number of people including billionaire George Soros, among whose well-funded causes are both drug-policy reform and improving the care of the dying.

When Soros and a handful of other wealthy philanthropists committed $8oo,ooo to winning Proposition 215 early in 1996, Zimmerman figured a medical- marijuana ballot initiative could win. It was time, he knew, for coot-headed professionals to finish the job that movement leaders like Dennis Peron had started. Peron had neither the money nor the Realpolitik experience to win a statewide ballot election, and his counterculture flamboyance was embarrassing. It didn't help that, while other advocates were deliberating over precise ballot language, Peron had rushed his own vaguely worded initiative to the secretary of state and had it printed up quickly, so that it became the official version (once the initiative started gathering signatures, the wording could not be changed). Zimmerman thought that Peron had done a terrific job of bringing the movement this far, but now it was time for grown-ups to take over.

Zimmerman raised another million dollars and led the fight, but the campaign's vision - as expressed by the ballot measure's wording - remained that of Peron, the movement's idealist founder. He believes that the innovative chaos his language birthed will be the movement's salvation, and he may be right. His radical proposition drew 56 percent of the vote. With Peron at its heart, Zimmerman at its head and almost $2 million in its pocket, medical marijuana had graduated from movement to player.

Can the victory be exported to other states? The image of police chiefs issuing marijuana-smokers ID cards has a distinctly "only in California" flavor. It's hard to imagine the district attorney in Fort Wayne, Ind., telling federal narcs, as San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan did, that he'll testify for the defense if they prosecute a local buyers club. The Manchester, N.H., city council may not be as willing as San Jose's to grant a zoning variance to a pot club. And no place has an organized gay community like San Francisco's.

But as California goes, so, often, goes the nation. Emission controls, the property-tax revolution and the New Age movement all started here. Reps. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., this year introduced federal legislation to move marijuana to the DEA's Schedule 11, to allow it to be studied and prescribed. And despite the federal government's stance, in 24 states - where more than 60 percent of the nation's population lives - laws already exist that to some degree recognize marijuana's medical benefits. Eighteen states permit therapeutic research programs, six allow physicians to prescribe marijuana - though the laws are symbolic, because there is no legal source of the drug and prescribing it is prohibited by federal law.

"Our view is, In the long run we won't be able to make medical marijuana available until it's rescheduled," Zimmerman says over a breakfast of grits and bacon in Santa Monica. "So, strategically, the question becomes: How do we create the preconditions that will move the president and Congress to make that decision? If we can create a checkerboard of states where [medical marijuana] is allowed, we can increase the pressure on the feds to create a uniform national standard." A medical-marijuana initiative is already on the 1997 ballot in Washington state. In Arizona, voters may resurrect a 1996 initiative that was overturned by their legislature. Zimmerman is trying to get the issue onto the 1998 ballots in Maine, Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and the District of Columbia.

It will be hard. Reacting to the criticism of Proposition 215, Zimmerman is coordinating the writing of the new initiatives and tightening the loopholes that made California's so vague. All will set age limits for caregivers, require parental consent before marijuana can be given to underage patients, specify which diseases marijuana can be used for and establish a number of plants a patient can possess - usually three to five. In several states, Zimmerman also wants to require the state to issue identification cards that will let patients avoid an arrest for possession rather than make them fight it out in court after being cuffed, printed and jailed.

Zimmerman has commitments from Proposition 215's main funders for another $2 million, but the opposition has found a counterweight in billionaire Steve Forbes. Shoring up his Christian right credentials to get ready for the presidential race in zooo, Forbes began running commercials to defeat medical- marijuana initiatives. "We need a renewal," he says, "of Nancy Reagan's effective 'just say no' campaign."

And even though Americans tell pollsters that they support medical marijuana, more than half also say that lifting prohibition of the drug as a whole is "a very bad From more than 20 years' experience in progressive political work, Zimmerman knows that where drugs are concerned, Americans are capable of fooling pollsters, one another and themselves.

Proposition 215 aside, he says, "I've noticed that when people talk about drug policy, they make sense and seem to understand nuance; and when they vote, they don't."

The Federal Response

The US Government could end the California experiment tomorrow by arresting, on federal drug charges, every medical-marijuana grower, distributor and user in the state. And there are many in the government who would like to do so. The Clinton drug war is bigger, by any measure - dollars, arrests, length of sentences than those of Bush and Reagan. The post-Cold War Pentagon has found a new purpose in the drug war, flying missions over the Gulf of Mexico and patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border. And, in some cases, it is marching straight over the face of the U.S. Constitution.

Since October 1996 - a month before the California vote - the National Guard has been providing satellite communications for nationwide teleconfierences hosted by the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America. While federal law and the Guard's charter prohibit soldiers from playing any political rote, "educating" the public about the dangers of drug abuse is part of the Guard's mission, says Dan Donahue of the National Guard Bureau, which is the Guard's liaison to the Defense Department and state governments.

A tape of CADCA's March 25 teleconference, though, shows CADCA director Copple engaging in pure politics. He leads a one-sided panel on "the devastating consequences of Proposition 215," asserting that "the American people were largely deceived by people who have no other agenda than to legalize drugs." He calls medical marijuana "a wolf in sheep's clothing." And he rallies viewers to defeat medical-marijuana bills in other states. Donahue says that he checked with the Guard's lawyers about whether its participation in such broadcasts constituted forbidden political activity; they said no. But, Donahue concedes, "our mission and these [costitutional] constraints are running somewhat into conflict."

General McCaffrey spent part of the summer touring the Mexican border, but his rhetoric on Proposition 215 has drifted all over the map. During the campaign, he was adamant that marijuana had no medical value, calling it "unworthy of the Middle Ages." At a press conference after the vote, he snapped, "This isn't medicine; it's a Cheech and Chong show." McCaffrey also said that the DEA would "absolutely" continue to bust marijuana offenders, regardless of their medical condition. After a month of considering how it would took on television to have DEA agents carting emaciated cancer patients off to prison, McCaffrey instead attacked in a different direction. On Dec. 30, he threatened doctors. Discuss marijuana with your patients, and we will pull your prescription-writing license. Stories circulate among physicians of researchers denied marijuana by the DEA for studies approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

He picked the wrong enemy. If there is a group richer and better organized than gays, it's doctors. Physicians were already dissatisfied with federal policy toward medical marijuana. They may disagree about pot's utility as medicine, but all agree that doctors, not policemen or politicians or generals, should be making the call. In 1991, for example, Harvard Medical School surveyed the nation's oncotogists, and of the thousand who responded, almost half said they'd already recommended marijuana to their patients. Nevertheless, mainstream medical groups opposed Proposition 215, largely because no FDA-approved, double-blind scientific studies on marijuana have been done. They haven't been done because the government has forbidden them.

Because marijuana is a Schedule I drug, researchers cannot obtain it without going through the DEA. Under the law, therefore, marijuana is a "worse" drug than morphine or cocaine, both of which have legally accepted medical uses and so are in Schedule II. Cops, not doctors, make this decision; in 1970, the authority to classify drugs was given to the attorney general instead of the surgeon general. There is no legal source of marijuana except the federal government, and the feds haven't wanted to share pot with researchers investigating potential benefits.

"The public's view of marijuana is substantially different from that of the authority structure," says Steven Thompson, vice president of government affairs for the California Medical Association, which opposed Proposition 215 but supports a new state bill to fund further research. "They may be out of whack with the science, but until you do the science, they're as right as anybody."

A week after threatening the doctors, McCaffrey announced that the government was giving a million dollars to the National Academy of Sciences to review the existing scientific literature on marijuana, a report that is due next year. But doctors are not optimistic about this ploy. Politicians and presidents have a habit of ignoring the marijuana studies they commission. Richard Nixon handpicked a panel, in 1971, that he was certain would trounce marijuana, and then, a year later, quietly buried its report, which, to his horror, recommended outright legalization.

California's doctors were unimpressed by McCaffrey's gesture toward science. By that time, even those who'd opposed Proposition 215 were irritated by the government's toughguy stance. The direct threat against physicians was the last straw. A group of doctors led by Marcus Conant filed a class-action First Amendment lawsuit and cleaned McCaffrey's clock. In April, a Reaganappointed federal judge placed McCaffrey and the Justice Department under an injunction that prevents them from taking any action - even making threats against physicians until the full case is heard, sometime in 1998.

McCaffrey refused to be interviewed for this article. But Rahm Emanuel, a 37-year-otd senior adviser to the president, offered the administration's position in a 10-minute monologue. Proposition 215 violates the FDA's procedure for approving new drugs. Letting sick people smoke pot sends a bad message to teenagers: that marijuana is healthful. And finally, the whole issue is a Trojan horse for legalizers, who ultimately want marijuana freed for everybody.

Throughout California's yearlong experiment, the administration has shifted its position on marijuana in response to scientific pressure. The National Institutes of Health issued a report in August that implicitly mocks McCaffrey's dismissal of pot's medical potential. The 17,000-word report methodically considers each of pot's current uses - in cases of AIDS, cancer, spasticity, glaucoma and others. It acknowledges, time and again, substantial evidence, however anecdotal, that marijuana can be helpful. Marinol, the report says, "does not fully satisfy the need to evaluate the potential medical utility of marijuana." The NIH also warns of marijuana's potential downsides. The drug might suppress the immune system - the Last thing AIDS patients need. Drawing hot, tar-laden smoke into the lungs is never a good idea, the report says, though whether its harm outweighs any potential benefit isn't clear. In short, the NIH concludes, science should be permitted, "dissociated from the societal debate over the potential harmful effects of nonmedical marijuana use"

After belittling medical marijuana for months, McCaffrey now claims that his mind is open. "We're very enthusiastic: about [the NIH report]," McCaffrey spokesman Don Maple told The Washington Post.

Maple now calls the drug czar's derision of medical marijuana last year a matter of "tonality." "He is absolutely supportive of research," says Maple. "If [marijuana] has medical benefit, have the right organs of the research scientific community demonstrate it and we'll take it from there." Maple even lets drop that the government will want FDA approval "before marijuana is rescheduled." Six months ago, the drug czar's office wouldn't even have entertained the possibility of rescheduling.

Drug-war orthodoxy has ruled for so long that Washington is baffled by California's insurrection. The White House can't go forward on medical marijuana because of years of drug-war inertia. And it can't go backward, because a court order and the polls block the way. For the moment, all Washington can do is posture and wait. Pot activists in California sense this and are operating on the assumption that they have some undefined period maybe six months, maybe a year - to demonstrate that medical marijuana can be used responsibly. In that time, they must disprove their opponents' dire predictions about rising teenage drug use, increased addiction and general debauchery. "We made a commitment to the voters about the meaning of Proposition 215 says Scott Imler, the 39-year old director of the West Hollywood club, who is agitating among the state's 17 clubs for uniform protocols. "It doesn't mean marijuana for your hangnails, and it doesn't mean 4,000 plants in your basement. We run a real risk of alienating the people who support us."

Quiet on the Western Front

It's too soon to know whether the Compassionate Use Act is leading hordes of youth down the gullet of sloth, vagrancy and addiction, as opponents predicted. Statewide crime and drugabuse surveys for 1997 won't be published until late next year. But I asked every policeman interviewed for this article, as well as the offices of the San Francisco DEA and the state attorney general, Dan Lungren, who has his eye on the governor's office, if they'd noticed, anecdotally, any increase in drug use, drug trafficking or public-order complaints since the vote. All said no.

Teenagers didn't get any message at all from Proposition 215, says Rodney Skager, who surveys youth about drugs for Lungren's office. This spring, Skager, who recently retired from the Graduate School of Education at UCLA, polled teenagers of the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District about Proposition 215. The Monterey teenagers, whose race and class demographics closely mirror the state as a whole, showed no changes in attitudes toward drugs. "Kids have a lot of experience with marijuana; they know more than their teachers about it," Skager says. "Nobody 'learned' froim Prop 215."

Marc Hering runs adolescent services at Center Point, a residential drugtreatment center in posh Marin County that has been praised by McCaffrey as a model of its kind. Hering flatly calls the "bad message" argument "bullshit."

"[The opponents'] message was that there is no responsible use of medicine, that the drug has all the power, which is exactly the opposite of what we try to teach," says Hering. "The irresponsible message wasn't 215 but the rhetoric from the opponents."

In California's urban ghettos, Proposition 215 Was eclipsed by a ballot initiative that struck closer to home: Proposition 209, which effectively ended affirmative action in the state. "You think it matters to these kids if a middleclass white gay man in San Francisco is smoking marijuana to help with his AIDS?" asks Karen Bass, executive director of Community Coalition, an outreach and drug-abuse-prevention center in South Central Los Angeles. "When the whole deal was coming down, some of my colleagues in [the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America] were on us, saying, 'Why aren't you yelling and screaming about 215 But we saw 209 as a bigger substance-abuse issue."

Teenagers I spoke with at rehabilitation units and community centers in Marin County, South Central L.A. and the Mission District of San Francisco seemed surprised to be asked about medical marijuana. "The reason this issue doesn't get much attention in this community is because we don't think our people will go to jail any less," says a handsome Angeleno with shaved sidewalls. "We took at who gets prosecuted and who actually gets jail time."

What the teenagers mostly wanted to talk about was how often street pot is laced with chili-pepper seeds, dried cilantro, manure or "sherm" (PCP). The idea that medicalizing pot means that sick people can get pure reefer strikes most of these youth as a real benefit. Says a San Francisco girl in a Burning Spear T-shirt, "The shit on the street just make you sicker."

Rahm Emanuel and the other opponents of medical marijuana may be right: Proposition 215 might be sending a confusing message. "A lot of things desperate adults do send messages to kids," one slouching L.A. boy mutters, which eams him a round of lazy high-fives. As a whole, the teenagers I met seemed more capable of parsing the law than they are given credit for. And it remains a matter of opinion whether the "bad message" argument justifies denying relief to sick people and jailing those who seek or provide it. Antonin Scalia, the usually conservative Supreme Court justice, spoke about this issue eight years ago, in another drug-war context, when he wrote, "The impairment of civil liberties cannot be the means of making a point."