Deputies Close S.F. Medical Marijuana Club

More than two dozen sheriff’s deputies swooped down on San Francisco’s largest medical marijuana club and closed it during a predawn raid Monday.

Four days after San Francisco Superior Court Judge William Cahill declared the club a public nuisance, a locksmith let a busload of deputies in through a back door of the Cannabis Healing Center at 6 a.m. They evicted seven people staying there, changed the locks and took inventory of the building’s contents.

Only a small amount of the drug--about three handfuls of dried marijuana and three dozen small plants--were found, Sheriff Mike Hennessey said. No one was arrested.

The raid was the latest skirmish over Proposition 215, the voter-approved measure legalizing marijuana for medical use in California. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer last week ordered six Northern California cannabis clubs to close--including the club raided Monday--saying that the initiative cannot override federal law.

Breyer rejected arguments that the clubs should be entitled to furnish the drug because customers find it hard to survive without marijuana to ease side effects of cancer and AIDS therapy.

Monday’s raid was the second time that the San Francisco club, the largest in the state with 9,000 members, has been shut down. This time, deputies will remain on the premises to ensure that it does not reopen, Hennessey said.

The enforcement action came two days after the club ceased operations voluntarily, co-founder Dennis Peron said. He said that as of Saturday, it had stopped distributing marijuana and was operating strictly as the headquarters for his gubernatorial campaign.

“We could fight, but it seems like everything is against us,” he said.

* LAST LINE OF DEFENSE: Patients fear L.A. Cannabis Resource Center will close. B1