Pot Club Founder’s Crop Seized

The founder of a medicinal marijuana club was arrested after police raided his rented home in Santa Ana and uprooted 40 marijuana plants in the backyard, police said Friday.

Marvin Chavez, 46, was released late Thursday after police searched his three-bedroom home on Meriday Lane. Police said their investigation is continuing and that Chavez has not been charged.

Chavez, who says he has provided marijuana to people suffering from catastrophic illnesses and smokes it daily himself to ease the pain of arthritis, said the plants that police confiscated were intended for his own use.

“This is my medication,” Chavez said Friday. “This is an act of war to take my medicine away and leave me here suffering.”

Police said they obtained a search warrant after getting a tip that Chavez had a small marijuana farm in his backyard. During the raid, officers pulled up enough plants--from seedlings to mature five-footers--to yield 16 pounds of marijuana, said Sgt. Baltazar De La Riva.

The plants were neatly tagged and coded, police said. Several had been harvested and were found drying in a tool shed, investigator said.

Chavez, who is free on appeal after a 1999 marijuana conviction, said he grows a single--yet sizable--crop each year, stocking up before the cooler, no-growing months approach. He said it took him six month to grow the marijuana that police confiscated Thursday. “They’re just picking on me,” he said.

He said he uses the marijuana to make tea and a special butter spread. Additionally, he estimated he smokes about four marijuana joints a day to dull the pain of arthritis and a spinal injury he said he suffered in a 1991 car accident.

Chavez founded a marijuana club after Proposition 215 was approved in 1996. The initiative was intended to clear the way for the medicinal use of marijuana with a doctor’s recommendation.

After his 1999 conviction, Chavez served one year of a six-year sentence before he was allowed to post bail pending an appeal.