Uncle Sam’s Farm : Imagine--getting marijuana free from the government. It’s a reality for the Acapulco Eight, who are supplied as part of an old medical program.

In a nondescript one-story brick building with no name or number, Mahmoud S. ElSohly toils behind an office door containing a small plaque that says only, “Project Director.” Of what, it does not say. Down the hall is another door with a sign that is just as cryptic. It says merely, “M-Project Personnel Only.”

Behind the building, a gravel lane gives no hint of what lies beyond the sign that warns ominously, “Restricted Area--Keep Out / Violators Will Be Prosecuted.” Some distance in, the road ends at a 12-foot barbed-wire fence with three whitewashed towers manned by armed guards.

Beyond the fence is America’s worst-kept secret.

Those who work for ElSohly speak elliptically of “the garden.” As in “Dr. ElSohly can’t come to the phone right now. He’s in the garden.”

They do not call it the United States Government Pot Farm.

“We don’t like publicity,” says Karen K. Lovett, administrative coordinator of the project. “If they don’t know you’re here, they can’t come looking.”

In this hometown of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and John Grisham is one of the oddest plots ever devised. It is seven acres and looks like a prison yard. Just now it is green with huge, luxuriant, sticky-ripe marijuana plants.

This is the only legal marijuana plantation in the United States.

In a way, it is a throwback, a testament to a time not long past when compassion and curiosity came briefly together for something good, if a little weird. Back in the 1960s, a lot of things were like that. Good, if a little weird.

There are many ironies surrounding this marijuana farm, which is run by the federal government under the tightest security on the outskirts of the campus of the University of Mississippi. For one thing, there is the simple fact of it. The federal government raising weed seems like the Vatican running the Mafia. Disturbing, on some elemental level.

But here’s the totally far-out part: This $250,000-a-year operation--the project administrators, the agronomists, the tillers, the planters, the weeders, the harvesters, the guards in their towers, the motion detectors--exists, by and large, to supply marijuana to eight people.

They are the eight patients around the country who are grandfathered into a now discontinued government program to provide marijuana, for medicinal purposes, free of charge.

Call them the Acapulco Eight.

They are potheads, technically, but they are hardly hippies. They range in age from 39 to 63. Some are grandmas and grandpas. They use grass so incessantly it doesn’t get them stoned.

Some have multiple sclerosis, some have glaucoma, some have other, rarer neurological or congenital ailments. The eight include a former torch singer, a retired ditch digger and body shop man, a stockbroker and so forth. Marijuana affects each user differently: For some it helps lessen pain and control muscular spasms, for others it restores enfeebled appetites, and for those with glaucoma, it helps reduce pressure in the eyeball.

They smoke up to 10 joints a day.

“In some ways,” says Robert Randall, 47, a former college teacher who lives in Florida and who credits marijuana for saving his eyesight, “we’re an embarrassment to the government.”

The Ole Miss pot farm produces enough marijuana to provide Randall and the rest of the Acapulco Eight each with 300 joints a month, 3,600 a year. And whatever its street value, ranging these days from $5 to $15 a joint, for these chosen few it is gratis. Compliments of the taxpayers.

For the Acapulco Eight, several of whom have turned into crusaders for the cause, there are obvious practical problems. When you smoke 10 joints a day, it is hard to be successfully furtive. Irvin Rosenfeld, 42, the stockbroker, is relegated by his Boca Raton, Fla., employer to a basement parking garage where, the other week, an elderly couple spotted him and fingered him to the fuzz. Fortunately, the arresting officer knew his story and let him go.

And imagine trying to consume the prescribed amount while on a long plane trip. Elvy Musikka, 56, the former torch singer from Florida, bakes marijuana cookies for such occasions.

The Acapulco Eight receive the cigarettes in tins of 300 each. Before he qualified, Rosenfeld says, “I had to sign a release that if I got lung cancer, I couldn’t sue the federal government.” Rosenfeld suffers from tumors throughout his body. “I said I should live so long to get lung cancer.”

*

It’s a late September day in northeast Mississippi, and at the Ole Miss government plantation, the herb is as high as an elephant’s eye. From the conical shape of the plants, it looks a little like a Christmas tree farm.

Everyone entering and exiting must sign in and sign out, and workers are searched routinely when the plants are ripe for picking. Nonetheless, there have been occasional breaches of security, and many more attempts.

As many as 7,000 marijuana plants, Cannabis sativa, are grown here at one time, and it is good weed. On this day, some of the crop has been harvested, but most has yet to be. It is of several varieties and sizes. Some plants are almost as tall as the chain-link fence.

“Look at this beautiful stuff right here,” beams ElSohly, showing off a full-grown plant, created from the cutting of another. He is 49, a balding, energetic pharmacologist from Cairo. His office is adorned with signed Reagan-Bush inaugural invitations from 1985 and half a dozen bowling trophies. He is an active member of the local Kiwanis Club. And though he says he has never sampled his crop or smoked any marijuana, he admires the hardy plant with the serrated symmetry. He wears a baseball cap with a marijuana-leaf design. “And there are cuttings out of cuttings,” he says. “Granddaughter plants!”

The plants are arranged neatly in rows, with labels in front indicating the country of origin (Mexico, Colombia or Jamaica) or simply a numerical designation. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration supplies the seeds, from which hybrids are also developed.

It is a labor-intensive process that swells the farm’s summer work force with Ole Miss students, who must pass a stringent security check to earn $5 an hour. This is good money hereabout. Annually, 40 students apply, from whom perhaps a dozen are chosen to work the field.

“This is about the best-paying job but probably the hardest,” says Kevin Gary, 21, a pre-law undergrad sifting marijuana seeds into a barrel.

In the center of the field are two metal sheds, “Bulk Tobac” curing barns. They are the kind used in the Carolinas to rapidly dry tobacco with heat pumped in from underneath. The leaves are then stripped and sifted and wind up in barrels for shipment.

The stalks, containing hemp fibers, are piled up and set ablaze. They burn quickly. One can only describe the smell as . . . familiar.

The barrels of marijuana are sent by airplane to Raleigh-Durham International Airport, and then taken to the nearby Research Triangle Institute, a nonprofit government contractor. At RTI, three workers operate an old cigarette machine acquired secondhand several years ago. On average, they turn out nearly 29,000 joints a year for the Acapulco Eight.

*

The farm is part of the Research Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences of the University of Mississippi. The choice of Ole Miss was coincidental, though the Oxford climate is ideal, allowing for a prolonged growing season of six or seven months. But the farm is here mainly because a man named Coy Waller, fresh from the pharmaceutical industry and looking for a research topic, came to Ole Miss in the 1960s when pot was hot. People loved and feared it. People wanted to know more about it.

Waller won a government contract to grow a crop for research, and the crop has been here ever since. The institute also does contract work, analyzing the content of suspected marijuana for law enforcement authorities nationwide. And nominally it remains a source of marijuana for medical research, though there is only one study in progress, a humble inquiry into the drug’s effect on lung disease. The study is consuming a minuscule amount of weed.

The farm did not become the supplier of marijuana cigarettes for sick people until the mid-1970s, as a result of a landmark court case in the District of Columbia.

Randall, then of Washington, was arrested for possession and cultivation of marijuana. His defense was that he needed it to treat his glaucoma, and with ample medical testimony, he won an acquittal in 1976. Promptly, he filed suit against the federal government for inclusion in the government’s “Investigational New-Drug” program. The suit was settled in 1978, with the government agreeing to supply him with marijuana smokes.

The precedent was set, and Randall became a guru for pot seekers with health problems. He formed ACT, the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics, and MARS, the Marijuana AIDS Research Service. “I started out to save my eyesight, not lead a movement,” he says. But over the ensuing years, he would help scores of patients fill out the necessary forms to qualify, though only a few of them actually got the joints. In 1991, he released to AIDS groups a how-to-apply kit.

Then, ironically, Randall’s very success killed the program. In 1992, Bush administration officials, facing a rising tide of applications from AIDS patients, concluded that so many legal potheads would send the wrong message, that the public might infer that marijuana wasn’t really bad for you, and that in itself was bad. They discontinued the program, locking in the 12 people who were then signed up. Four of the 12 have since died, of AIDS.

There hasn’t been a major movement to restart the program, in part because of its low profile and in part because a reasonable medical alternative does exist: A drug called Marinol contains marijuana’s intoxicating chemical, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. It is available as a pill, with a doctor’s prescription. But the Acapulco Eight say they’ve tried it, and it doesn’t work nearly as well.

Why can’t the pot farm be closed, replaced by a less expensive program to funnel to the people who need it the tons of pot that are confiscated yearly in police busts around the country and destroyed? Two answers, the government says: quality control and guaranteed supply. Relying on police seizures would result in spotty quality and, worse, in possible interruptions of supply during periodic drug famines.

Few people like the current system, but no one in authority seems determined to change it. Not long ago, the Clinton administration reviewed the program and decided not to expand it, for pretty much the same reasons as the previous administration. The President Who Didn’t Inhale declined to intervene.

When these eight legal users are gone, will the pot plantation continue?

“I wish I knew,” says Rao S. Rapaka, who oversees the government grant to run the place. “I don’t.”

So. How is Uncle Sam as a connection?

The Acapulco Eight are grateful, but not entirely satisfied. The joints that come from the government, they complain, are sometimes low-grade, often containing seeds that pop and fizz. Sometimes there are even dead insects, they say. And since the cigarettes are frozen before shipping, they arrive too dry to smoke.

The art of moistening a government joint is a subject of ongoing discussion among the marijuana users. Official instructions say to steam it, but users complain that that only ruins the paper wrapping. Some have found another solution. They unroll the cigarette and place the marijuana with lettuce in sealed plastic Baggies. After some time, the marijuana absorbs some of the moisture in the lettuce and is fit to smoke.

*

The local folklore about the marijuana farm is as thick and sweet as smoke. Some of it’s true. Most isn’t, says Jim Urbanek, formerly site project coordinator and now in charge of the adjoining medicinal plant garden, where the stuff they grow is legal. “I’ve heard everything,” Urbanek says. He’s heard all about the three-pronged fishing hooks cast over the fence to catch a leaf or two. Not so, he says. He’s heard about the field hands stuffing their trouser cuffs. True enough.

Attorney Thomas Freeland represented the first outsiders prosecuted for stealing pot from the farm, back in 1980. They were two young men from Memphis.

“They just climbed over the damn fence,” he recalls, or at least one did, and tossed the hooch over the fence to his partner. They were charged with trespass, not possession--back then, a possession conviction in Mississippi required a mandatory three-year sentence, which no Oxford judge was willing to impose. “I think they got probation and went back to Memphis sadder if not wiser.”