Marijuana Distribution Ban Alarms Patients

In the three years since Marlene Rasnick learned she had ovarian cancer, she has smoked marijuana--legally, with her doctor’s assent--to ease her suffering from the disease and from punishing rounds of chemotherapy.

Marijuana’s ability to keep nausea at bay and diminish pain has “raised my spirits” and allowed her to continue to enjoy life’s small pleasures, Rasnick said.

“I can sit in my garden, read, talk with friends. It allows me to experience more than just the effects of the disease and the chemo,” said Rasnick, 56, an actress and teacher who lives in Silver Lake and runs the Public Works Improvisational Theatre with her husband.

Little wonder, then, that a U.S. Supreme Court order Tuesday shocked and frightened Rasnick and other 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.

Some in law enforcement, however, 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.

The court sided with the Clinton administration, which had asked it to overturn a lower court ruling allowing an Oakland cannabis club to resume distribution of the substance. The Oakland club and five others were part of a U.S. Justice Department case to test the California law.

Tuesday’s order is unlikely to have much immediate effect on the other cannabis clubs around the state. In the past four years, approximately two dozen sprang up to distribute marijuana to patients who met the state’s requirements for its use.

However, the court’s intervention was widely interpreted as a signal that it probably will review the entire distribution issue this fall and could ban all the California clubs.

Operators of some of the clubs not included in the test case said Wednesday they plan to continue operations. But they said the ruling is unsettling to the approximately 5,000 Californians currently permitted to use the substance.

“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 the substance 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,” said Imler, adding:

“We just want to be able to take care of ourselves in peace and not be constantly threatened with arrest and prosecution.”

‘Thunderstruck’ by Ruling

The court action came as the Los Angeles Cannabis Center is in the process of buying its own cultivation and distribution building, with expected help from the West Hollywood City Council. It is working toward its goal of growing all of its own marijuana to ensure high quality, Imler said.

Orange County criminal attorney Robert L. Kennedy, an advocate 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.

As his son-in-law Paul Comouche lay dying, Kennedy read that marijuana helped reduce the pain of cancer patients. He contacted Marvin Chavez, the director of the Patient, Doctor, Nurse Support Group in Garden Grove, who then provided marijuana until Comouche died. Later, Kennedy represented Chavez 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.

“If marijuana can ease dying people’s excruciating pain, what’s so wrong with that?” Kennedy said.

He said the court’s ruling would force people to either cultivate their own marijuana or illegally buy it from street dealers.

Chavez, who was released after serving 15 months in custody on charges of selling marijuana, said the Supreme Court “is inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on people who are already in pain. This is a drug war against sick and dying Americans.”

Some law enforcement officials don’t see it that way.

In Ventura County, the chief of the sheriff’s narcotics unit cheered the court’s action, saying he hoped justices would ultimately 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 Capt. Dennis Carpenter, who oversees the narcotics unit of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.

“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 medical requirements to receive their product. Many say it is the only thing that works for them in relieving pain and nausea, thus enabling them to keep down food and medicines.

Rasnick, the cancer patient, insists that 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,” Rasnick said. “Without it, I don’t know what I’d do.”

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Times staff writers Hector Becerra and Margaret Talev contributed to this report.