Marijuana Club Puts Compassion Ahead Of Legality
From among the marijuana banana bread and magic brownies, the cannabis “merry pills” and the eight grades of loose marijuana listed on the cheery wall menu like ice cream flavors, Gypsy Calabrese chose a bag of the top-grade Asian “Quad-A.”
“After I leave here,” Calabrese said as he packed a pipe with the greenish crumbles, “I won’t feel my pain.”
An arthritic, HIV-positive cabaret performer, he was speaking, literally, of physical pain, and speaking for most of the nearly 8,000 members of the Cannabis Buyers’ Club of San Francisco.
For to pass through its portals into this supremely illegal haven, where hundreds of smokers chat at cafe tables and bars as they serenely fire up pipes and joints in the pungent haze, there is one exclusive requirement.
“You have to be sick or dying,” said club director Dennis Peron.
If you are, with a doctor’s note to prove that you have AIDS or cancer or another condition with symptoms that marijuana is known to alleviate, Peron is willing to sell some relief.
That is still illegal, of course, and he risks a three-year sentence for every bag he sells out of the 40 pounds and $60,000 worth of marijuana per week that he estimates passes through the club.
But in the decades-old battle over whether marijuana should be legalized, Peron and suppliers like him are opening the latest major front: They are forcing the issue of whether the drug should be provided to the very ill, particularly AIDS and cancer patients who use it to relieve nausea, stimulate appetite and dull pain.
And if that front has a physical focus, it is at 1444 Market Street, not far from City Hall - the biggest open secret in town.
The Cannabis Buyers’ Club here was founded more than two years ago, but since moving into its rented five-story office space last fall, membership has ballooned to the current 7,800 members, Peron said. About 1,700 pass through its three stories of lounges and alcohol-free bars on a given day.
The San Francisco club has been left alone because of a series of “compassionate use” resolutions and decisions by the city powers. They order police to assign their lowest priority to enforcing the marijuana laws when the violators are seeking relief from pain and illness.
The police grit their teeth, complaining that many of the members are not really sick, but the Cannabis Buyers’ Club remains untouched.
The legitimate medical purposes remain in dispute at the federal level. The Drug Enforcement Agency refused to re-classify marijuana in 1992 so that it could be prescribed, saying there was no scientific proof that it was safe and effective.
Federal officials also argue that a pill that contains a key element of marijuana, THC, is available legally, marketed as Marinol.
But many patients and doctors swear by marijuana. Surveys show that oncologists routinely recommend it to their patients to offset the nausea brought on by chemotherapy, and doctors have found it helps combat the “wasting syndrome” that afflicts AIDS patients by stimulating appetite. Some glaucoma sufferers use it to lower the pressure in their eyes, and people with multiple sclerosis say it can ease spastic episodes.