Pubdate: Wed, 15 Jun 2005
Source: Willamette Week (OR)
Copyright: 2005 Willamette Week
Contact:  http://www.wweek.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/499
Author: Nick Budnick
Cited: Gonzales v. Raich ( www.angeljustice.org/ )
Cited: National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws ( www.norml.org )
Cited: Marijuana Policy Project ( www.mpp.org )
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)

IN WEED WE TRUST

Despite the Supreme Court's ruling, Barbara Elfstrom-and Oregon-are 
not going back.

In her family's small Gresham apartment crammed with antiques, 
52-year-old Barbara Elfstrom pours coffee while the soap opera 
Guiding Light plays on a large TV.

Her hands shake so much that serving the brew is a daunting task, 
sending droplets flying over the rim of the cup. The instability 
stems from her various ailments, but it might as well be her mood: 
She is angry and scared.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal cops do not have 
to respect states' laws: Rather, they can arrest this mother, her 
grower, and all others involved in the state's medical-marijuana 
program-which was approved by 55 percent of voting Oregonians in 1998.

Elfstrom is not a leader or an activist. She has never been quoted in 
any newspaper, and you won't find her name in any search on Google. 
But Elfstrom, who has been smoking pot for more than 30 years and has 
had a medical-marijuana card for two years to combat what she says 
are bipolar mood swings, chronic pain and fibromyalgia, says, "I'm 
not going down quietly." If they take away her medical pot, she is 
"ready to go underground."

Then she dips into an antique, hermetically sealed jelly jar in which 
she keeps a strain of fragrantly fruity weed called Blueberry 
Northern Lights. She lights up a reddish glass pipe: "It's called 
'The Carburetor,'" she says affectionately. "It was a birthday present."

Conversations with Elfstrom, law-enforcement officials, judges and 
physicians, along with an analysis of existing data, suggest that the 
pot genie is out of the bottle. Medical marijuana has helped to 
legitimize pot culture in Oregon. Even the Supreme Court's recent 
ruling will have little effect. With all the other pressing problems 
out there, society seems to be passing pot prohibition by.

As Multnomah County Circuit Judge Doug Beckman puts it, "I think 
there's a broader social acceptance for users of marijuana. And 
gradually there's increasing public pressure, I think, to 
decriminalize marijuana."

As government programs go, medical marijuana in Oregon has been a 
striking success. Initially, it was thought that only a few hundred 
people would request cards. As of last week, more than 10,500 
Oregonians have licenses that allow them to possess and smoke pot.

"I am number 500, and it was expected we wouldn't go past that 
number," says Madeline Martinez, president of the Oregon chapter of 
the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. "It was 
never even a thought that it would be this successful."

There are those, of course, who say the huge participation rate is a 
sign that the entire program is a scam. It does appear to be fairly 
easy to secure a card. The accepted list of medical conditions one 
needs to obtain a card includes everything from cancer (as of Jan. 1, 
2005, listed by 253 applicants), glaucoma (215), to nausea (2,194), 
persistent muscle spasms (3,054) and severe pain (9,111). (Many 
patients list more than one malady.) The number of Oregon doctors who 
have granted licenses now totals more than 1,700, a vast increase 
from the early days, when one semi-retired osteopath, Phillip 
Leveque, signed applications for nearly 4,000 cards. (The state 
suspended his license in 2004, noting that he often did not examine 
patients or keep medical records.)

Oregon law does not require doctors to write a prescription. Rather, 
they fill out a form that states that the patient suffers from one of 
the conditions that qualifies them for the program, and that 
marijuana might help. Once approved, possessors of a card are allowed 
to grow a limited amount of pot themselves, or name a provider, who 
then is granted a card, too.

Some states have programs similar to Oregon's, while others are 
stricter. In Vermont, the list of qualifying medical conditions is 
much tighter. And in Nevada, applicants must pass a background check 
to ensure they do not have a criminal conviction for dealing drugs.

"Given what states can do in this atmosphere of federal hostility, I 
think Oregon has done a pretty good job," says Bruce Mirken, 
spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based Marijuana Policy Project.

The issue settled by the U.S. Supreme Court last week was whether the 
federal government could preempt states that had voted to allow 
medical marijuana. A majority of justices ruled that thanks to its 
constitutional authority over interstate commerce, the federal 
government had the right to bust those who were participating in 
medical pot programs. Interestingly, this ruling came from the 
liberal side of the bench, including John Paul Stevens, David Souter, 
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

As KINK-FM news director Sheila Hamilton quipped at a City Club event 
last week, alluding also to federal opposition to Oregon's 
physician-assisted suicide law, "Now we can't kill ourselves or get 
stoned while we're terminally ill. That's like, so bogus."

The judges who voted in the minority on medical pot included some of 
the court's most conservative members-Clarence Thomas and William 
Rehnquist. They took a traditionally conservative states'-rights 
point of view-that the federal government had no right to be mucking 
around in the decisions made by individual states. In his dissent, 
Thomas translated the majority's opinion: "By holding that Congress 
may regulate activity that is neither interstate nor commerce under 
the Interstate Commerce Clause, the Court abandons any attempt to 
enforce the Constitution's limits on federal power."

Even the judges who ruled in the majority were sympathetic to the 
cause of medicinal marijuana, opining that existing federal law was 
anachronistic and that "despite a congressional finding to the 
contrary, marijuana does have valid therapeutic purposes." In fact, 
the Court encouraged Congress to step in and change federal law in a 
way that would be friendlier to medical marijuana. Good timing: A 
House vote was scheduled as early as this Tuesday, June 14, on a 
congressional bill that would block federal enforcement actions 
against qualified patients in states with medical pot laws.

Regardless, the Court's ruling allowing federal enforcement is 
unlikely to have much practical effect.

After the ruling came out last week, state law-enforcement officials 
said it merely echoed what they'd believed all along. But they are 
sworn to uphold state law, so while the medical pot program 
temporarily suspended issuing new cards, it is likely to resume soon. 
Ken Magee, who is the Oregon spokesperson for the federal Drug 
Enforcement Administration, essentially told WW that bona fide 
medical-marijuana patients don't need to panic. Magee says his agency 
has not requested the list of cardholders. As for whether it will in 
the future, he declined to say but did not make it sound likely.

"We do not target sick and dying patients," he said. "We do advocate 
research for marijuana to determine if it does have medicinal value."

This rather mellow-sounding position may simply be due to his 
superiors' realization that pot-medical and otherwise-appears to be 
here to stay.

Peruse the magazine section of the Jantzen Beach Barnes & Noble and 
you will find both High Times and Cannabis Culture magazines for 
sale. The Fossil store in Lloyd Center sells a T-shirt reading 
"Oh-so-hi-o." Vans sneakers sell a line with a pot leaf on the sole 
of one of them. Go into a conservative-minded truck stop outside St. 
Helens and you will find marijuana-leaf logos accompanying the usual 
right-wing bumper stickers and fantastical female silhouettes.

Some of the ways marijuana turns up would have been unthinkable 
several years ago. Turn on your TV and on That '70s Show you will see 
one of its staple gags-the teenage kids lighting up and saying 
really, really deep things-in just about every episode. During a tour 
of the Oregon Council for Hispanic Advancement's alternative high 
school last year in downtown Portland, the kids were unloading crates 
of hot sauce made by Cheech Marin of Cheech and Chong fame-the same 
man who is now a spokesman for Target.

The issue of medical marijuana has gone so mainstream that the Pho's 
in Portland restaurant on Northeast 82nd Avenue, soon to be renamed 
the One World Restaurant and Tea House, is building a special room 
where customers who show their medical marijuana cards can go to 
light up. It is unclear how the business's plans will be affected by 
the recent Supreme Court ruling, if at all. A woman who answered the 
phone Monday confirmed that the plans are still underway.

While it's difficult to prove, it does seem as though the acceptance 
of pot in Oregon remains greater than elsewhere in the country. 
Oregon is the only state in the country where a state chapter of 
NORML hosts an annual Medical Cannabis Awards contest and trade show, 
where the latest in technology for extraction of THC (the main active 
chemical in marijuana) is displayed and the best buds rated (event 
organizers normally set up a discreet room nearby where patients can light up).

Oregon also is one of the largest marijuana-growing states in the 
nation. In February of this year, the federal Department of Justice 
placed Oregon among the top six states in outdoor cultivation-giving 
a special nod to Jackson, Josephine, Klamath and Umatilla counties. 
That does not include the flood of high-quality B.C. bud pouring in 
from Canada.

Of course, the fact that a lot of pot is grown here does not 
automatically mean a lot of pot is smoked here. But other data 
suggests that is true. Oregonians might be surprised to know that, 
according to a federal survey done in 2002-2003, almost 9 percent of 
all Oregonians aged 12 or over had smoked pot in the past month, as 
compared with a 6.2 percent average nationwide. Put another way, 
Oregonians were 43 percent more likely to have smoked weed in the 
last month than the average American.

Even if you don't trust statistics, anecdotally, cops say there's 
more weed out there than ever. And entrepreneurs serving marijuana 
users, legal and otherwise, say business has been booming.

At Up in Smoke in North Portland, a shop that sells tobacco and other 
apparatus, employee Larry McMurphy says he has seen tremendous growth 
over the past five years. His customers are very diverse and wear 
anything from "three-piece suits to patches."

Mark Herer, owner of a Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard 
smoking-paraphernalia shop called Third Eye (and son of Jack Herer, 
author of the pro-legalization bible The Emperor Wears No Clothes), 
displays hundreds of water pipes on shelves and in cases, and says 
his sales have gone up five-fold in the past five years. In the span 
of a half-hour interview, he makes at least eight sales. And it's not 
just him: "Smoke shops are popping up everywhere," he says.

Pollster Tim Hibbitts says that not only does medical marijuana enjoy 
wide support among Oregonians, he suspects that the younger crowd is 
more open to complete legalization than in the past. Times have 
changed, he says: "I doubt if you would have gotten passage of a 
medical-marijuana initiative 20 years ago."

But perhaps the most striking sign of weed's acceptance is that 
people who years ago were unwilling to talk about marijuana laws now 
do so without much prodding.

There may be no one tougher on crime in Oregon than Steve Doell, the 
hardcore conservative leader of Crime Victims United and the prime 
mover behind Measure 11, the state's minimum-sentencing law. He says 
he smoked pot in college and recalls, "As far as I was concerned, it 
was a great sleeping pill. It put me out." And though he's anti-drugs 
now, "I think it's probably a waste of time to use law enforcement to 
chase down people who have small amounts of marijuana for personal 
use," he says. "You certainly don't hear about many potheads going 
out and doing violent crime." As for federal laws on pot, he says, if 
the horror stories he hears about federal mandatory minimums on 
marijuana are true, "there's something wrong there."

Others feel even the penalties for illegal growers may be too stiff. 
"We make very serious life changes for people, and I'm not sure it's 
the right thing," says Multnomah County Circuit Judge Nely Johnson.

Currently, if you are busted with an ounce or less of marijuana in 
Portland, you face only a misdemeanor violation-a $500 ticket. Only 
for quantities above that do you face a potential felony, but the 
quantities must be very large to get any jail time. And you can get 
your first felony erased by signing up for drug treatment through 
Multnomah's drug court, called STOP.

Judge Beckman, former head of the STOP court, believes weed should be 
further decriminalized. He says society's acceptance of marijuana 
use-medical or otherwise-keeps growing, and the criminal-justice 
system has not kept pace-especially in federal courts, which he calls 
"draconian."

"My feeling is that the criminal-justice system is not really solving 
the problem," he says, adding that the focus should be on treatment, 
not incarcerations.

Beckman's and Johnson's concerns may be legitimate, but the fact is 
that the criminal-justice system in Portland has substantially 
already decriminalized pot, simply by choosing to prosecute it less.

While there seems to be more pot and more pot smokers-legal and 
illegal-than ever, the "war on pot," once a major source of 
controversy in Portland (see "Knock, Knock, You're Busted," WW, March 
10, 1999), has virtually ceased. According to the Portland Police 
Bureau, the number of arrests for marijuana has dropped by 45 percent 
in the past five years. The number of pot plants seized annually by 
Portland drug cops-which hit its peak at more than 17,000 a decade 
ago-is now down to just a tenth of that, at 1,725.

A big reason for this shift in priorities is the state's 
medical-marijuana law, police say. In Portland at least, the laws on 
the books regarding marijuana in Oregon appear to be joining the many 
other laws already gathering dust. As Multnomah County Circuit Judge 
Ed Jones puts it, "We're not doing much about hunting in cemeteries 
either-but we've got a law about it."

Perhaps the person the most keenly aware of marijuana enforcement in 
Portland is the county's head drug prosecutor, Mark McDonnell, a 
soft-spoken senior deputy district attorney who says he is no 
anti-pot zealot. "I smoked pot when I was a kid, I know what it's all 
about," he says. "And let's face it, it doesn't do you a whole lot of 
good to sit around and smoke pot all the time, which is what a lot of 
these people are doing."

His unit is struggling with dangerous drugs like meth and heroin, as 
well as a staffing shortage due to budget cuts. That, combined with 
the medical-marijuana program, is making marijuana laws "impossible 
to enforce," he says. When officers "investigate it, charge it, go 
all the way to trial and the guy claims he has an affirmative 
[medical-marijuana] defense...the case falls apart," says McDonnell. 
"We can't afford that."

As a result, "cops are essentially throwing up their hands," he says. 
"I don't even hardly pay attention to it anymore. [Marijuana 
enforcement has] become a nuisance.... Judges don't care. Generally 
speaking, juries don't care."

Does the dramatic drop in arrests mean there's less pot out there? 
"Hell, no," says McDonnell. The arrests now are driven by neighbor 
complaints or if the person violates what McDonnell calls "'the pig 
rule'-it's obvious that they are being a pig about it."

Portland Police Sgt. Brian Schmautz, who spent years as the bureau's 
top pot cop, has kept an eye on how the drug has gradually gained 
acceptance in popular culture. Speaking for himself, not his 
employer, Schmautz says medical-marijuana proponents have 
successfully changed the terms of the debate: "I think anytime you 
say that something has medicinal value or that people are helped by 
it, there's less stigma attached to it." And in the political climate 
in Portland, if you question the medicinal value of pot, he says, 
"you're not a caring person."

Schmautz is avowedly anti-drug, saying he has seen marijuana abuse 
and addiction ruin lives. But even some of the contradictions he sees 
in the program seem almost to endorse a stronger one. "I don't quite 
understand how if someone says this is great medicine, then why not 
tax it and distribute it like any other medicine?," he says. "You're 
allowing people to self-medicate as much as they want to, as often as 
they want to. I think we allow people to be less than what they could 
be because of this political morass."

Morass it may be, but a newly legitimized one: Earlier this year, the 
state Department of Human Services realized that it could raid the 
fund created by medical pot fees to help cover budget holes 
elsewhere. Providing perhaps the biggest sign yet that marijuana has 
gone mainstream, last month the state House of Representatives voted 
49-10 to take $900,000 of the available $1.1 million in pot license 
money for the general fund. Bureaucrats are already talking about 
raising the $55-per-card annual fee. Could pot be the next lottery?

Elfstrom, for her part, says she started smoking pot at age 17, after 
her first suicide attempt, and before she was diagnosed as bipolar. 
Once she was diagnosed, she kept using it, since pharmaceuticals were 
not an option. Marijuana "made me happy," she says. "I can't take 
lithium; I have a terrible reaction to it." Elfstrom says the weed 
has cut her reliance on the morphine and Percocet she gets through 
Kaiser Permanente for her chronic pain. She cut back from 75 
milligrams of morphine to 25 milligrams per day, and she now consumes 
only 150 Percocet pills per month, down from 280. She can see the 
increase in pot's public acceptance even in her own family, where her 
mother was very critical of her smoking.

"But when it became legal, she had no problem with me smoking it," 
says Elfstrom. "She doesn't like me to smoke it in the house, but she 
does let me smoke it at her house-I go out in the garage. And that's 
a big deal for a 73-year-old woman who was dead set against it."

News intern Robert Hamrick contributed reporting for this article.