A Setback For Medipot

Sales were strong on 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."

Two years ago, the Institute of Medicine concluded that marijuana has potential therapeutic value. Polls show nearly three-quarters of Americans favor medical-marijuana use, and juries are increasingly reluctant to convict sick people for possession. Oregon, Alaska and Hawaii have set up state registries for medipot users; Colorado, California, Nevada and Maine are debating similar moves. Such grassroots enthusiasm carries little weight with drug warriors, who dispute the scientific data and argue that marijuana leads to hard narcotics. In an interview with TIME last week, Attorney General John Ashcroft praised the Supreme Court decision. "We can't function well as a country if each state makes its own rules about what's available health-care-wise," he argued. "If Congress wants to exempt various people from the laws of this country, it's their duty."

That's unlikely. But neither the Justice Department nor the DEA has said whether the court ruling will cause them to mount a new offensive against medical-marijuana clinics. And as a practical matter, most individual pot infractions fall under state and local jurisdiction, and an increasing number of local law-enforcement officers are refusing to prosecute medipot cases.

Still, Scott Imler, president of the L.A. center and an epileptic who smokes weed to control his seizures, fears the worst. "If they march in here with storm troopers and seize the building, I can't imagine it would be politically popular," he says. "But maybe they don't care."