San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi wants to regulate San Francisco?s pot clubs ? in order to protect them.

At the top of a flight of stairs behind an un-marked doorway near the corner of Church and Market, a poster reads “Please, no smoking tobacco or blunts.” Inside, to the left past a row of brown-vinyl upholstered diner-type booths is another sign. “Positive vibes only, no negativity allowed.” To the left of that, past a battered sofa, inside a glass display counter, are plastic jars with masking tape labels that read “Knock Out” and “Skunk” and “Northern Lights.” And above that a hand-written list on a white board reading, “Indica: Relaxation and Appetite, Body High” and “Sativa: stimulant, depression, migraines,” then the same names as on the jars, and the prices: an eighth of an ounce for $45 and $325 for a whole.

“A spliff a day keeps the doctor away,” reads a banner over the sofa.

The room, the site of San Francisco’s oldest medical marijuana club, founded by pot-proponent Dennis Peron, has been variously called the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club, CHAMP (Californians Helping Alleviate Medical Problems) and now is the San Francisco Medical Cannabis Clinic. It first opened in 1992, four years before California voters passed Peron’s Proposition 215 to make medical marijuana legal in California.

Behind the counter, manager Jim Kyne says that about 30 to 40 percent of the club’s customers are HIV/AIDS patients. About 8,000 people have San Francisco Health Department-issued medical marijuana ID cards, and a steady stream of customers just present a card to the doorman, come upstairs, do their business, and leave. But some hang around. “It’s like a living room feel here,” Kyne says. On a rainy afternoon not long ago, five patients were lounging around the sofa watching a movie, the one-star 1998 Almost Heroes, on cable TV. One of them, who wants to be known only as Michael, says he comes to the dispensary at least weekly.

“I come here because I can use the bongs,” he said, as two of the club’s other regulars, a pair of Pomeranians, scampered across his lap. But some of them, Kyne said, come because they live in public housing projects or on the street and don’t have anywhere else to go. Most days the club provides lunch.

Advocates, and San Francisco’s city government, say the medical marijuana industry provides needed medicine to the sick. The US Drug Enforcement Administration says the approximately 37 medical pot clubs in the city are breaking federal law and distributing a Schedule I narcotic which the law says has no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. And Dale Gieringer, who heads CAL-NORML, a San Francisco-based marijuana advocacy group, says the two are about to crash, head-on, as soon as the US Supreme Court rules on a case which, ironically, has the potential to finally legalize medical pot in California.

The plaintiffs in the case, Raich, et al. v. Ashcroft, et al, most often called Raich-Monson after the two women who are pressing it, Angel McLary Raich and Diane Monson, say that because pot grown from California seeds, in California soil and sold only to Californians doesn’t involve interstate commerce—which is the basis for all federal drug laws–then the federal government shouldn’t have any jurisdiction over it. If the Supreme Court were to find for Raich and Monson, the decision wouldn’t affect just California, but all 11 states that have legalized medical cannabis in one way or another. Gieringer says that not only is the high court expected to rule against the pair, who are long-time California medical marijuana patients, but that the decision is likely to embolden federal authorities to challenge San Francisco’s status as a self-described medical marijuana sanctuary and start raiding the pot clubs.
“We are expecting a federal crackdown,” said Gieringer. “We have heard numerous reports indicating that investigations are under way in various parts of the state. The authorities are waiting until after the Supreme Court decision simply so they can be certain of the best legal strategy.”

No matter how adverse the ruling to medical pot in the Raich case is, the law itself won’t be getting any stricter. California’s Proposition 215, which legalized medical marijuana here in 1996, has been at odds with federal law ever since. But Gieringer warns that the major impact of an adverse decision would be that California sheriffs and police who are hostile to medical marijuana would use the decision, he said, “as an excuse for ignoring Prop. 215.”
“If the Supreme Court reaffirms federal law, look for locals to be more involved in anti-medical marijuana raids,” he said.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration won’t talk specifically about its future plans. But Rich Meyer, the spokesman for the DEA’s San Francisco office, said that even though they are short staffed here, the federal authorities have “made it clear that we take our job seriously.
“Marijuana is illegal to cultivate, possess and distribute,” he said. “This is a democracy. No person or institution is above the law. We are enforcing federal law.”

 Although the DEA won’t say what their guidelines for prosecution are, and which cases they leave to local authorities, Meyer said the DEA won’t go after users. “We see users as victims of drug traffickers. It’s never been our mission,” he said. Nor do they prosecute lower level street dealers.

But would the DEA’s 50-person San Francisco bureau go after the city’s pot clubs?

“They are not safe from prosecution,” Meyer said. “Those places are operating illegally. The fact that we haven’t gone up there to seize drugs doesn’t mean we won’t.

“They should not be surprised if one day we show up at the door to serve a search warrant.”

On Tuesday the DEA raided a 500-plant indoor grow near San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point which the growers said was for medicinal use. “Just about every place we’ve gone to has claimed that it was a medical marijuana grow,” Meyer said.

On the same day that DEA agents were raiding the San Francisco warehouse on a cul-de-sac beside the bay, across town at City Hall Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi was pressing legislation which will, he hopes, bring the clubs a measure of protection–and regulation.

His ordinance, which that day got a unanimous thumbs-up from the Board and which the mayor has said he will sign, puts a 45-day moratorium on what has become the explosive proliferation of medical pot dispensaries in the city.

While the Church Street club was once alone, and as recently three years ago the city had about seven, now there are at least 32 clubs with fixed addresses and another five that deliver. One almost opened in the storefront of a hotel where the city pays for support services to substance abusers, until the operator’s landlord cancelled the deal in the face of pressure from the Mayor’s office. Three have sprung up on Ocean Avenue, midway between City College and San Francisco State University, but also a few blocks from a city-run middle school and almost across the street from a Catholic grammar school.

The head of SFPD’s Narcotic Division, Capt. Tim Hettrich, says the situation is “like the Barbary Coast,” because today there are no city rules for pot clubs. They are not subject to zoning ordinances, which would have prohibited a liquor store in the spots on Ocean Avenue.

Mirkarimi will start hearings on April 25 to discuss how the clubs should be regulated. And most dispensary owners, understandably, are enthusiastic backers of the idea. It freezes the number of clubs at its current level until the city has had time to draw up detailed regulations.

Pot clubs don’t usually pay taxes of any sort, even sales taxes. “Anyone who tried to keep numbers, it came back and bit them in the butt,” aid medical pot advocate Wayne Justman. According to Justman, one group that did, the Los Angeles Cannabis Resources Center, was rewarded for their honesty with a raid in 1998. Income tax returns present similar problems.

The rules the existing dispensaries would like, said Justman, are some high barriers to entry: a $25,000 permit fee, and a requirement that all pot club owners must be card-carrying patients and must live in San Francisco. Justman says that existing South of Market clubs were upset when a Mendocino grower moved in and started offering farm-direct prices.

But Justman doesn’t see an easy way to implement a direct quantity-based taxation scheme, and, he says, instituting a permit fee would require a referendum. So he suggests that the operators should voluntarily pay into some sort of a pool, to be contributed to the city’s general fund, until a referendum can qualify for the ballot.

For the patients, Justman says clubs should have some weights and measures regulations, maybe some rules about mold and pesticides and definitely some zoning controls so they’re not crowding each other–or the city’s schools.

But Hettrich has a problem with the sheer number of clubs. “I think there are way too many of them right now,” he said. “Why should San Francisco have one-third of the pot clubs in the state of California?”

Answering his own question, Hettrich says that there is “huge money” in operating a pot club; and in San Francisco they have been largely immune from prosecution.

Justman says that a pound of good quality pot, like the staples at Church Street, goes at wholesale, for somewhere between $3,200 and $3,600. That price, he says, includes an at least $1,000 “fear factor” over the grower’s costs. But even with that included, at the Church Street club, that pound of pot would walk out the door in eighth-ounce vials for over $5,000. Church Street’s Kyne won’t talk about daily volumes, except to say, “we sell plenty.”
While Mirkarimi’s proposed legislation will put some controls on the clubs, one of the side effects, he hopes, will be to put an umbrella of city protection over them. Now, Justman said, “the only thing we’ve got is a wink and a nod from the city,” as far as dispensing is concerned.

Mirkarimi’s hopes his legislation will, he said, “inoculate” by bringing the clubs out from the shadows. He said that by regulating them, the city will set in motion the ability to “protect and defend” the medical cannabis community.

So are Gieringer’s fears about the feds raiding the clubs justified? Could it happen?

“Sure,” said Mirkarimi. “They’ll look for people who are breaking the existing regulations…. They’ll pick off the weak.”

“And don’t forget the state,” Mirkarimi said. It was state intervention after public complaints that forced the city of Oakland to cut the number of clubs there to four.

So if Gieringer is right, and the DEA is planning a foray into San Francisco’s sanctuary for medical marijuana–what would San Francisco’s own do about it? Would there be a thin blue line of San Francisco police, in front of each of the clubs, guarding against raids by federal agents–cop vs. cop?

“I don’t think it’s going to come to that kind of an impasse,” said Mirkarimi, who supports legalizing pot entirely; but then allowed, “States and cities are not able to trump the federal government.”

So if push came to shove, what would SFPD’s Hettrich do? What would his boss, Deputy Chief Morris Tabak, the head of investigations, tell him to do?
“We’re for people getting the medication they need to survive,” Hettrich said.

But if the DEA began breaking down the doors at Church Street, what would the Department do?

“Nothing,” said Hettrich.

The SFPD wouldn’t try to stop federal agents. Nor would it help them, he said. Hettrich rails about but people “going in there and buying and selling it to kids,” He complains about loose standards for medical marijuana recommendations. But he says he approves of medical marijuana, “I think it’s a good thing,” he said.

“But it’s a mess."