HERE IS A RECENT POWERPOINT PRESENTATION WAMM HAS CREATED.
August 18, 2006
County residents who have a doctor's recommendation to use marijuana for medical purposes can legally possess up to 3 pounds of marijuana buds and have a 10-foot by 10-foot area of marijuana plants under cultivation.
That's according to attorney Ben Rice, who said Santa Cruz County has some of the most liberal medical marijuana regulations in the nation at an informational talk sponsored by the Santa Cruz County Law Library.
The session, which also featured Allen Hopper, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Drug Reform Project, was designed to clear up confusion about the ever-changing regulations on the herb.
"This area has so much gray area, and it is evolving all the time so there's some confusion," said Rice, who has defended dozens of medical marijuana patients who have been arrested. Although marijuana use and cultivation is illegal under federal law, it has been permitted in California since 1996, when voters passed the Compassionate Use Act. The law calls for patients with a doctor's recommendation to use marijuana in medical treatment to be exempt from criminal penalties.
Santa Cruz County, like all counties in the state, is required to issue identification cards to residents who have obtained a medical marijuana recommendation.
Rice explained that patients don't have to have a county card to be protected. However, the card allows them to enjoy added protection from arrest or citations.
Each county can enact its own guidelines regarding how much medical marijuana patients can legally possess. However, federal law supersedes local regulations, Rice said. "No matter what kind of recommendation you have, or what kind of illness you have, you're not protected if the federal government comes after you," said Rice. "But we all know that the federal government does not have the resources, or the will, to bust people who are taking care of their recommendation." Head librarian Dolores Wiemers said she asked a library intern to put a collection of marijuana legal resources together after receiving numerous requests from patrons for information on medical marijuana. Rice helped advise the intern, then volunteered to present the talk as a free public service to draw attention to the law library, which is located in the basement of the County Government Center.
County Sheriff Steve Robbins, who noted that his predecessor Sheriff Mark Tracy helped get the county's medical marijuana ordinance passed, said in an interview before the talk the issue is a medical one, not a law enforcement issue.
"People talk about the war on drugs, but we're not in a war," Robbins said. "People have a right to their medicine."
Deputies don't seize medical marijuana if they can verify people's medical status, he added. Deputies will, however, look into neighborhood complaints about pot growers, largely because growers have been the target of robberies.
"Our main focus is methamphetamine," Robbins said. "Marijuana hasn't been our focus, except in the large-scale commercial grows" guarded by armed gunmen.
Santa Cruz County residents have long had a liberal attitude toward medical marijuana. In 2002, after federal agents raided a medical marijuana garden of the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana and arrested the organization's founders, city officials allowed WAMM to distribute medical marijuana to patients from the steps of City Hall.
Currently, there are two medical marijuana dispensaries operating in Santa Cruz. Voters in the city will also be asked to decide whether or not police should make enforcing marijuana laws a low priority when they go to the polls this fall. Although there was no charge to attend, organizers had requested participants make a donation to benefit the Law Library, and WAMM. Rice offered Groucho Marx masks to people who contributed money. He said the give-away was a bit of black humor, because federal law trumps California's more liberal laws about medical marijuana.
"Nobody wants to be seen walking out of a medical marijuana talk by law enforcement," he said, referring to federal agents. Contact Terri Morganat kalexander@santacruzsentinel.com
There were a couple points in this article I took issue with: one of the problems we face today is the lack of any clear lawful way for people who are unable to grow their own medicine to secure it. Sheriff Robbins and our DA's office don't believe it is legal for people to grow and sell to clubs. They don't even believe that clubs are lawful. Fortunately, the city and many other jurisdictions in the state do permit clubs. At the talk I emphasized our need to clarify this in the law to protect people who are trying to provide wholesome medical marijuana at a fair price. Also, in response to the sheriff's comments, I will note "for the record" that our county gets grant money to go after marijuana but not for methamphetamine or other harder drug problems. That is a big disconnect in my view.
The talk described above will air on Community Television. I'll try and post it here as well in the future.
At first blush, it seems illogical: Medical marijuana advocates want more county regulations for the legal use of marijuana.
Nonetheless, some pot proponents are demanding the county be more specific about how much marijuana people can grow or carry for medical purposes.
Though many counties have adopted possession guidelines for medical marijuana since passage of Proposition 215 in 1996, Santa Cruz County has not. While the county's handling of the issue is considered progressive, the Sheriff's Office deals with arrests on a case-by-case basis, making judgment calls about whether a person is growing more plants than an illness demands.
Andrea Tischler, a medical marijuana advocate and co-owner of the Compassion Flower Inn, a pot-themed bed and breakfast in downtown Santa Cruz, says the county's lack of guidelines turns police into doctors and forces the ill to live in fear.
"People who are sick do not need to have the added stress of wondering if they're going to be arrested for growing cannabis as a medicine," Tischler said. "How can a sheriff's deputy make a decision about whether 10 plants are too many for a patient? That is strictly the providence of the doctor and his patient."
Although it's almost impossible to calculate, Tischler estimates there are at least 2,000 people in the county who have doctors' recommendations for using marijuana.
Christina Adams, 29, learned she had multiple sclerosis when she was 9. A single mother of two, Adams says marijuana alleviates her muscle spasms and is critical for getting her through the day.
Adams can't get pot, however, because it's so expensive, and she can't find a caregiver to grow it for her because, without guidelines, county residents are too afraid to grow it, she said. "No one's really sure how much they can grow, and they're fearful," she said. "The county has definitely worked with us, which has been good, but I would like to see a written and more structured policy."
When Adams cannot get marijuana, she is forced to take pain and spasticity pills that she says "mess with my head way more than marijuana." When pot is available, Adams uses it sparingly - two or three puffs in the morning and afternoon is all it takes to ease her symptoms, she said. Tischler would like the county to adopt guidelines similar to the ones Sonoma County follows. In May, it adopted guidelines that allow patients to possess 3 pounds of processed marijuana per year. The patients or their caregivers are allowed to cultivate a canopy of marijuana up to 100 square feet in size.
A limit of 99 plants was established because 100 plants is the trigger point for federal sentencing.
The guidelines were written by the county's primary pot-advocacy group, the Sonoma Alliance for Medical Marijuana.
Sonoma and Alameda counties are the only two in California that base limits on plant size rather than plant number. Humboldt County, for example, limits cultivation to 10 plants per person. That's because, according to federal guidelines, plant or "canopy" size is the only way to accurately predict plant yield, said Doc Knapp, a spokesperson for the Sonoma group. Individual plants yield varying amounts depending on size and length of harvest.
Local attorney Ben Rice, who defends many of Santa Cruz County's medical marijuana patients, pointed to client Jeff Rodrigs as his proof that Santa Cruz's system is flawed.
In 1999, Capitola police confiscated the 10 plants Rodrigs was growing in his back yard. Rodrigs was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis 10 years ago. Though the District Attorney's Office dropped the charges, Capitola police destroyed the plants, which had just reached maturity and were ready to harvest. Rodrigs' medicine for the year was gone, Rice said. Rodrigs filed claims for $75,000 against both the city and county. The case is still in court. Rice said even though county policy toward medical marijuana is progressive, there are deputies on the street who aren't.
According to Rodrigs, when he showed a doctor's prescription for medical marijuana to the head of the county's Marijuana Enforcement Team in August 2000, the officer, sheriff's Sgt. Jim Hart, called that doctor a "quack." Hart, who is no longer head of the team, denied making the comment during testimony in March.
The testimony was for a case the county brought against Kim Kleiner. Officials said Kleiner's cultivation of 14 plants exceeded the amount he needed to treat his arthritis. Kleiner had a prescription from Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld of Sausalito.
In his testimony, Hart said he is "skeptical" when he sees prescriptions from Schoenfeld, who writes prescriptions for many local medical marijuana users. When asked in court if he personally believed marijuana had medical benefits, Hart said, "There's no medicinal or proven medicinal benefits. If it makes a person who's dying of cancer or some horrible disease, if it makes them feel better, I don't have a problem with that person smoking marijuana."
When Rice asked Hart if he thought marijuana could help a dying person medically, as opposed to psychologically, Hart testified, "I think any time you have to breathe in smoke for a medical benefit, that the negatives are going to outweigh the positives. It's been proven it breaks down the immune system and causes other problems for people that already have a deficiency with their immune system."
Hart said he read that information in "some article." He couldn't specify where. "When you have that kind of attitude, it's really important you protect people who are bona fide so police won't take their medicine away," Rice said. "I've had elderly and very sick people who've gone through the trauma of having the cops show up." Hart declined to comment Friday.
The Marijuana Enforcement Team investigates about 55 cases per year. In the fall, county Supervisor Mardi Wormhoudt asked the county Health Services Agency and the sheriff's and district attorney's offices to study whether the Sonoma group's guidelines would be good for Santa Cruz. The Sheriff's Office reported back to the board last week.
The verdict: Specific guidelines would only hurt the seriously ill. The report said every patient's needs differ. A seriously ill person may need to use pot heavily and regularly, while someone with a minor illness or occasionally recurring problem can get by with less.
Wormhoudt first thought Sonoma's guidelines made sense but changed her mind when she learned how complicated the issue is. She also worried strict guidelines would lead to more arrests.
"Right now if you have a doctor's prescription, people really are not getting arrested. I worry that if you said a person can have six plants, and a deputy came in and saw seven, the deputy would feel he had to arrest, where now there's much more discretion," Wormhoudt said. "I think the Sheriff's Office is working pretty sensitively with providers and consumers of medical marijuana, and that this is really a situation where you could make things worse by trying to make them better."
The board approved the sheriff's recommendation. Wormhoudt said the Sonoma group's guidelines might be good for a community where law enforcement is arresting people unnecessarily.
Knapp, of Sonoma Alliance for Medical Marijuana, said that was the case there. Sonoma deputies were arresting many sick residents before the new guidelines were passed, he said. After their passage, the arrests not only stopped but the District Attorney's Office dropped all existing cases, Knapp said.
Contact Jeanene Harlick at jharlick@santa-cruz.com.
This is a quote from the California Attorney General's brief (on behalf of the State of California) in the OAKLAND CANNABIS BUYERS CLUB case currently on remand in the Northern District of California.
"Advancements in science and technology often give lie to the verities of the moment. The Controlled Substances Act (CSA) was enacted the year before the first commercial microprocessor was introduced. By 1996, the year California adopted the Compassionate Use Act (Prop 215), the Internet and the World Wide Web were skyrocketing. Millions of Americans owned and operated microprocessors in their cars, toys, ovens, as well as in their home and office computers. If the "findings" section of a 1970 law had stated "microprocessor chips have no use in the home", certainly this Court would not refuse to admit evidence that now clearly contradicts that finding. Congress may be wise, but it cannot know the future. When Congress asserts "factual" findings that are plainly contradicted by objective evidence, a court must follow the evidence. At the time of its introduction, the CSA classified marijuana as a drug having no accepted medical use. Times change. The CSA classification is no longer a statement of science, but a hollow phrase bereft of factual support. It should have collapsed upon itself long before the citizens of California adopted Proposition 215. "
WELL SAID! AND REMEMBER: THE US SUPREME COURT DID NOT INVALIDATE CALIFORNIA'S LAW REGARDING MEDICAL MARIJUANA USE, POSSESSION, CULTIVATION OR TRANSPORTATION. IT ONLY HELD THAT CLUBS, LIKE OAKLAND'S, CANNOT USE THE "NECESSITY DEFENSE" TO DEFEND AGAINST FEDERAL OFFICERS SHUTTING THEM DOWN.