Medical Marijuana Center in Mourning

The only grass they were growing Monday at the pot club in West Hollywood was lawn turf.

It was planted over a pair of mock graves in front of the headquarters of the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Center--beneath crosses labeled “Compassion” and “Democracy” that mark the end of a five-year effort to provide medical marijuana to people who are ill.

Federal drug enforcement agents raided the Santa Monica Boulevard center five days ago, uprooting 400 marijuana plants, seizing special indoor growing lights and hauling off computers listing the names and medical histories of the center’s 960 members.

The raid has angered those who claim their health depends on puffing marijuana cigarettes or munching pot-laced brownies and muffins. It has outraged West Hollywood city officials who have cultivated good relations with those cultivating medicinal cannabis.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do now,” said HIV patient Lawrence Ornella, 50, who used a cane to hobble up a stairway to the second-floor office of the cannabis club Monday afternoon.

Gaunt and gray, Ornella is undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments for cancer. “Marijuana gives me an appetite. Otherwise, I can’t eat,” the Los Angeles resident said.

Club member Mary Lucey, who has been HIV positive for 15 years, was in tears as she contemplated permanent closure of the center. “I truly believe marijuana saved my life,” said Lucey, 42, a governmental policy analyst who lives in Venice. “Panic went through my mind when I heard about the raid. There are no alternatives for me. I don’t want to find a drug dealer. That’s not a useful environment to be in.”

Thursday’s raid by 30 drug agents was not a total surprise to operators of the center. They organized the nonprofit, member-supported cooperative in 1996 when California voters approved Proposition 215, an initiative that permitted small amounts of marijuana to be grown for medical purposes.

But the state measure conflicted with federal anti-drug laws. And five months ago, in a case involving Northern California pot clubs, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an 8-0 ruling that all but invalidated the California initiative.

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration cited the ruling in the affidavit for a search warrant for the West Hollywood raid. That affidavit declared that “illegal conduct permeates the organization’s activities and that all documents, records and equipment present at the site constitute fruits, instrumentalities or evidence of federal criminal offenses.”

Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, said authorities are examining evidence seized and are “investigating certain individuals in terms of criminal prosecution” for the marijuana club’s activities.

After the six-hour search, workers at the center dug up some of the dirt from their indoor pot farm and carted it outside to create the mock cemetery.

“Our dispensary is closed,” center President Scott Imler told those who showed up Monday for their doctor-approved “prescriptions” of marijuana, which sold for about $50 for an eighth of an ounce. “All you can do is call your congressman, call your doctor and show up here next Tuesday for our protest.”

The Nov. 6 event would have been a fifth anniversary ceremony for the center and for passage of Proposition 215.

Instead, it will be a wake staged next to the turf-covered faux graves. Imler, 43, a former special education teacher from Santa Cruz who smokes marijuana to control epilepsy-triggered seizures and cluster headaches, said his center had stricter rules for dispensing marijuana than similar clubs elsewhere.

The federal agents recognized that and “didn’t draw guns or put anybody in handcuffs. They were polite and didn’t tear the place apart. They know we are good people basically stuck between a bad law and a hard place,” he said.

But Imler criticized the government for using a time of national crisis for the raid.

“I think it’s shameful the Justice Department would waste money going after medical marijuana while the rest of the world is falling apart. If they had been doing what we paid them to do, then maybe we’d still have a World Trade Center.”

Operators of the marijuana club said they intentionally kept a high profile, even to the point of working closely with Los Angeles County sheriff’s officials who provide police protection for West Hollywood. In 1999, the center registered with the DEA and gave agents a tour of the building.

Thursday’s raid was condemned by West Hollywood officials, including council members Steve Martin and John Duran, who is the cannabis club’s lawyer.