Medical Marijuana Advocates Criticize High Court’s Ruling

With the United States Supreme Court on Tuesday coming one step closer to barring Californians from giving marijuana to people racked by pain, the quality of mercy has become ever more strained, local advocates said.

“What the Supreme Court is doing is inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on people who are already in pain,” said Marvin Chavez, a Santa Ana marijuana-for-medicine activist who spent 15 months imprisoned on drug charges related to his cannabis club.

Chavez, 45, called the court’s decision “a drug war against sick and dying Americans.”

Orange County criminal attorney Robert L. Kennedy, a supporter of marijuana for medical use since his son-in-law died of brain cancer three years ago, said he was “thunderstruck” by the Supreme Court decision.

He called it odd that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday took steps that would allow a needle exchange program on the same day the justices showed a strong willingness to strike down the distribution of marijuana for medical purposes.

“People are dying, suffering, and they can’t have medicinal marijuana. But we’re going to give clean syringes to heroin addicts,” Kennedy said. “It’s so ironic, it’s absurd.”

The Supreme Court order shocked and frightened Californians who have found that marijuana--legal for medical use here since 1996--is the only thing that lessens their suffering from such debilitating illnesses as cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis and epilepsy.

The court ruling, which backs a U.S. Justice Department move to close an Oakland cannabis club, is seen as indicating justices’ willingness to consider invalidating the state’s medical marijuana law.

The justices sided with the Clinton administration, which had asked it to overturn a lower court ruling allowing the Oakland club to resume distribution of marijuana.

The Oakland club and five others were part of a Justice Department case to test the California law.

Tuesday’s ruling is unlikely to have much immediate effect on the approximately two dozen cannabis clubs that sprang up around the state to distribute marijuana to patients who met the state’s requirements for its use.

However, the court’s decision was widely interpreted as a signal it will consider the legality of the proposition this fall and could ban all the clubs, which have become the major conduit for patients to receive their marijuana.

Club operators said the ruling is unsettling to the approximately 5,000 Californians permitted to use marijuana.

“Our phones have been ringing off the hook. People are afraid,” said Scott Imler, president of the 840-member Los Angeles Cannabis Center in West Hollywood, one of the largest and most stringently run clubs in the state.

Imler, who helped write the 1996 initiative and smokes marijuana to alleviate pain from epilepsy, called Tuesday’s ruling “a bad omen.” But it will not stop the club from providing marijuana to its members, 80% of whom have AIDS or are HIV positive.

“We have come too far in the last few years, and we have no intention of being driven back to the streets to meet our needs,” Imler said.

Kennedy said the ruling would force people to grow their own marijuana or buy it illegally.

Three years ago, as his son-in-law Paul Comouche lay dying, Kennedy read that marijuana helped reduce the pain of cancer. He contacted Chavez, then director of the Patient, Doctor, Nurse Support Group in Garden Grove. Chavez provided Comouche with marijuana until Comouche died at age 31.

Kennedy became Chavez’s lawyer when he was arrested in 1998 on charges that he sold marijuana to an undercover officer posing as a caretaker for a terminally ill patient.

“Personally, I wouldn’t have wanted my son-in-law, who was a choirboy till he was 21 years old, having to buy from a drug dealer in the streets,” Kennedy said.

Some in law enforcement welcomed the ruling and said the Compassionate Use Act, approved by voters as Proposition 215, has created problems, including some healthy marijuana users hiding behind the law.

In Ventura County, the chief of the sheriff’s narcotics unit cheered the court’s action, saying he hoped justices would strike down the law.

“We don’t feel there’s sufficient medicinal benefits of the drug, and they’ve created a nightmare for us to deal with,” said that chief, Capt. Dennis Carpenter.

“Many people we’ve known for years to be users now all of a sudden have severe headaches, and before the law came up they had no medical conditions.”

Operators of cannabis clubs hotly dispute that, saying their members must meet stringent requirements to receive their product.

Many say it is the only thing that relieves pain and nausea and enables them to keep down food and medicines.

Marlene Rasnick, 56, a cancer patient in Los Angeles, insists the marijuana she obtains from the Los Angeles Cannabis Center and smokes daily is what gives her the strength to keep fighting her illness.

Marijuana “has been my best defender, both from the disease and the therapy,” the actress and teacher said. Without marijuana to deal with the effects of the disease and the chemotherapy, “I don’t know what I’d do,” she said.

*

Times staff writer Margaret Talev in Ventura County contributed to this report.