A Setback For Medipot

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Sales were strong at 7494 Santa Monica Boulevard last week. Prices were neatly posted; customers paid by credit card; computers tracked inventory; a Better Business Bureau plaque gleamed behind the counter. On the lounge TV, a video showed Los Angeles County Sheriff Leroy Baca praising the place: "A great success...things are done properly and people who need services are getting those services."

But the success and services of the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Center and similar medical-marijuana distributors across the country could soon be history. Last week the U.S. Supreme Court in a unanimous decision declared that illness is no excuse for legalizing marijuana--not even to ease the suffering of patients with cancer, AIDS or other life-threatening diseases. The folks on Santa Monica Boulevard, however respectable, are committing a federal crime as they collect baggies of Maude's Mighty Moss ("large and luscious reddish green buds, easy to break and roll," $18 a gram) and Adobe ("compressed green bud, fresh and tasty, with seeds and stems," $4 a gram).

The court's foray into the medipot conflict did little to resolve the highly politicized issue. Justice Clarence Thomas' opinion was narrow. It affirmed the government's power to shut down a cannabis cooperative in Oakland, Calif., but stopped short of invalidating laws passed by nine states allowing marijuana for medical use. Thomas' opinion skirted the states'-rights issue at the heart of the case--does California have the right to legalize medipot?--and a concurring opinion from three liberal Justices, led by John Paul Stevens, chided the conservative majority for "overbroad language...given the importance of showing respect for sovereign states." Stevens also suggested that while medical necessity can't be invoked by a mass distributor, it might still be a defense against prosecution of an individual--"a seriously ill patient for whom there is no other means of avoiding starvation or extraordinary suffering."

That's a good description of the 880 members of the Los Angeles cooperative, three-quarters of whom have AIDS. The rest suffer from cancer, multiple sclerosis or other diseases, and all have marijuana prescriptions fromm licensed physicians. Leanne Orgen, 46, an insurance broker with liver cancer, buys pot-laced chocolate-chunk brownies--a "miracle drug" for chemotherapy-induced nausea, she says. Jeffrey Farrington, 32, who has glaucoma, explains that if he stops smoking marijuana, which relieves ocular pressure, he loses more than 7 ft. of vision daily. "If they shut us down," he says, "I'll go blind and I'll watch my friends die of AIDS."